Flipping the bird at answers

The last time I wrote about my life I included some comical pictures. This time pictures would be gross, kind of like this:

Because two new things happened to me the other day. No, three! One. A doctor had a pair of one-use-only scissors half an inch into the bottom of my foot. Two. Sitting at an Errol Street cafe, I called to my friend across the road as we spoke on the phone: ‘I’m waving my crutch at you.’ I was trying to get her attention. Three. I stepped on a broken hookah pipe.

Living where I do, it was only a matter of time.

We all saw it, and none of us decided to pick it up. I was ambling around the backyward, squinty-eyed from sleep and looking not for a hazardous piece of glass but for socks.

After that I was going to put the socks on, then some shoes, and then I was going to seize the day. Instead I seized my foot, brought it closer to my face and said ‘Fuck! really loud. Frustration, mostly, because the pain hadn’t hit yet.

As I was anticipating the local anaesthetic – still the most painful experience of my life, including the bit where I actually stepped on the glass, including tattoos, piercings and various other trauma – I wondered about how pain is localised. There I was, in a relatively low amount of pain, then I would experience relatively excruciating pain, then I would feel nothing. But would my pain remain where I was, the only difference in the world being that I could no longer feel it? My nerves would remain as severed as they were before the anaesthetic, it’s just that a chemical interference would prevent my brain from being aware.

I imagined driving past the hospital some time and remembering the pain I felt in there. I don’t know – I guess I was expecting that I would remember the pain in exquisite detail. Now that it’s a dull throb, I don’t really remember the acute pain.

Then I wondered how being surrounded by others’ pain might affect the psychology of a person over time. Forget the question of dealing with others while they express distress as a result of their pain, what about being surrounded by so many loudly firing synapses?

I also wondered about my doctor: he was almost dismissive of me, as though I was an inconvenience, rather than someone who needed his compassion and medical expertise; I wondered if his capacity for empathy had been diminished by constant contact with others’ pain. Probably not, because otherwise he would have left the profession by now.

And admittedly, I wondered this mostly while I was hopping down the hall like a dickhead while he carried on ahead, walking like someone who hadn’t just gored himself on a bong. Also, I gradually realised, as I prattled away, that his scorn was indiscriminate. I wasn’t its target, I was just in the way.

The thing is, he got me wondering about doctors past, how it would have been a vastly more hostile place in the days before anaesthetic. How would those doctors have fared, surrounded by pain they could not stop? Indeed, to alleviate their patients’ pain in the long term, they often had to inflict greater pain in the short term.

Then I wondered about the individuals experiencing that pain. Um, so this is basically me just wondering about how human psychology and behaviour might have changed since the way we experience pain has changed.

I stumble around barefoot all the time. Would I be less careless if I thought that severely injuring myself would result in enduring the acute pain of being stitched with anaesthetic? Because I was surprisingly calm after the frustration and anger had dissipated, and this had something to do with knowing that soon I would experience acute pain as a means to painlessness.

I know people who refuse to use pain killers unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I guess others have wondered about the long-term effects of numbing our pain. I’m gonna have a bit of time to wonder for a while …