Earth Experiences #3: The Pain We Choose

Versus the pain that chooses us

My Substack is free, but writing is how I pay my bills and feed my pups. If you’d like to subscribe, please do! If that’s too big a commitment and you’d like to make a one-time donation instead (maybe a really good cup of coffee?), I would appreciate that, too. Many thanks for your support.

---

On Friday, I finally had my total left knee replacement. I’ve been waiting for my appointment and limping around on my dying bones since January, so it was a welcome relief when the date finally rolled around.

“This isn’t a gentle surgery,” my anesthesiologist said as he was prepping me for the OR. “It’s a lot of buzz, buzz, hammer, hammer.” I laughed nervously at his vivid description of orthopedic bone saw and mallet sounds. “We definitely want to make sure you don’t feel what’s happening.”

“I definitely don’t want to feel what’s happening,” I replied.

When I woke up in recovery, my nurse had me get up and walk with my borrowed walker right away. (Thanks, Frannie!) I would have preferred to stay snuggled up on the crunchy hospital sheet in my heated blanket, but it was past 5:00 at the surgery center, and everyone in the recovery wing was ready to go home for dinner and Wheel of Fortune. Once I was able to maneuver my way to the bathroom (and use it successfully), I was sent to my own home with a bag full of pills, clean bandages, and compression socks.

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a Super Sleeper. I can sleep anywhere, at any time, and I can sleep longer than all of you combined. I can fall asleep on a dime, and I stay asleep like a hibernating bear. But at 2:00 AM on the Saturday morning after my surgery, I woke up in my bed, twisting and turning in excruciating pain. Please note that I’ve had four c-sections, a complete hysterectomy, a spinal laminectomy, and kidney stones that had to be surgically removed, so I’m no stranger to pain.

But this.

It felt like someone had ripped my skin open, sawed the ends of my diseased bones off, and hammered new bone-like structures into the fragments of the leg bones that remained.

Oh, wait. That’s exactly what happened.

Buzz, buzz. Hammer, hammer.

The pain was deep and intense and untouchable and extraordinary. I balled my hands into fists and then released my fingers over and over. I writhed and wriggled as much as I could without causing additional pain. I gritted my teeth. I curled the toes on my right foot. I sucked air in through my nose and blew it out of my mouth. I counted slowly to ten and then started over again. I tried to distract myself with the lyrics to Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe.

You can kiss a hundred boys in bars
Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling
You can say it's just the way you are
Make a new excuse, another stupid reason
Good luck, babe (well, good luck), well, good luck, babe (well, good luck)
You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling

Hot tears slithered down my cheeks as I tried to hum my way back into a manageable existence. Even Chappell Roan couldn’t save me. The pain was agonizing, torturous. It was a persistent searing, burning, unrelenting assault.

Looking back, I’m guessing that what I experienced in Saturday morning’s wee hours was nerve pain. I haven’t felt anything even close to that kind of pain since then. In fact, this recovery has been relatively pain-free as far as surgery recoveries go.

But when I was crying my way through the darkest hours of Saturday morning, I felt like the agony might never end. Like there was no relief. Like all hope had been lost, and I was passing through the gates of hell with Dante and Virgil.

And then I remembered that this was pain I chose. This was pain I raised my hand for. I voluntarily elected to have this surgery with the vision of a better life on the other side of it. I chose to have my bones sawed and hammered so that I could hike in the mountains with my kids again and play pickleball to my heart’s content and walk on the beach at sunset and dance to bad 80s cover bands.

So many others on this earth suffer, but their suffering is not by choice. Whether its war or famine or disease or natural disasters, people suffer endlessly in this world. And when bombs are dropped on hospitals and grade schoolers are shot in their classrooms, this is pain that hasn’t been chosen.

This is pain that has been inflicted.

Pain that is not chosen is so much more devastating than pain that is.

Life is hard. Damn hard. And there isn’t always a promise of something better on the other side of our suffering. But if we don’t hold on through the brutality, we might never know the beauty.

It’s worth it, I think, to try and meet the beautiful halfway. To clench our jaws and dig our fingernails into our own skin and to breathe our way to the cool, clean air that’s just around the bend; to crawl to the edge of the stream and sip the cool, rushing water.

It’s worth it, too, to meet those who are in the throes of it, to offer a hand across the abyss. To say, “I see you. I hear your pain. I can help. I am bearing witness, and I will pull when you can no longer push.”

Because sometimes, that’s the difference between another human making it or giving up.

Wrapped gently in the quilt my Granny gave me in the 1970s.

None of us are immune to pain. No one gets to escape it. But we can lessen the pain of others with a word or a whisper. With a glance or an acknowledgment.

Do not turn away from pain, be it yours or another’s. Let’s walk each other across that familiar divide.

No one should have to travel it alone when we all know the way.