Pain Is Relative

But not relatable.  (My own word but it's what I mean to relate.)

This is NOT a treatise on family and the trouble we can have with those interesting relatives who make up our extended families.  This is quite simply about pain.

How is yours coming along?  Yes, I mean your pain.  Oh, you don't have any that you know of and don't really relate?  Then please stop reading here and move along to something more entertaining.  Reading this could actually cause a discomfort you wouldn't otherwise need to address.

Now, for those typical folks who DO suffer pain now and then, does it seem almost impossible to describe exactly, precisely, the pain you are experiencing at any given time?  That's because it IS impossible.  The best any of us can do is approximate a description of our pain, and often even that isn't easy.  This is because the ONLY person who can completely know a certain pain is the one who is suffering it.  Others can listen to attempts at describing a specific pain, but they can come only reasonably close to actually understanding it - or could be very far from grasping it and not know how badly they are missing the real grasp.  Someone may sympathize with you because you are suffering, but that is a real arm's length reaction.  Others can empathize with you because they have felt pain (perhaps in the same area of the body) and know it can be miserable.  Some may commiserate with you because they feel a closeness to you and are willing to share in your misery - the very meaning of "co" is to share or take part in, as in the way a coworker is one who helps with, shares in, the work.  A commiserater shares the misery.

But relating?  Someone can tell you that he/she relates to what you are describing.  That could mean that the person has known a pain similar to the one you seem to be suffering.  But the pain you are feeling and the one the other person has experienced may be related in about the way distant cousins are related, actually not sure they know each other when suddenly meeting again after years of non-contact.  Even if the pain experiences in question are closer to the way identical twins relate to each other, they are still not identical.

My dear wife has various pains and maladies that she tries to describe so I can grasp a little of her misery.  Our only shared pains that are similar are those that hit our lower backs.  Each of us proudly presents with a congenital anomaly of an extra vertebra.  This (we are told happens to one in 100,000 births) unnecessary and perhaps not well formed structure at the base of the spine would be no problem if it behaved entirely like its fellow vertebral connections.  But it doesn't.  Not as flexible, or when it flexes, is prone to getting stuck in a painful lock-down, followed often by massive muscle spasms around the lower and middle back.

Here is an attempt at describing just an outward effect of my own lower back difficulties, and though my wife and I suffer similarly, this is not the way she would try to clarify it:  My putting stroke, on the golf course, has developed around my pain.  Some who see me on the greens will assume I have tried to mimic Jack Nicklaus, which wouldn't be a crazy thing to do considering his success - but it is not the reason I crouch the way I do to putt.  Before I attempt a putt, I stand virtually straight to line up the path I expect the ball to take, then to hit the putt, I bend the knees and get low over the ball in a position most would not want to achieve.  The reason?  There is a commonly taken position over the ball (one I used myself a few years ago) which requires a simple bending of the spine.  If I were to take that stance today and try to hold it long enough to make the putt, I may well be stuck in that position for the rest of the day or for the next several days, suffering extremely painful spasms and needing crutches or a cane to allow any mobility.  Consequently, my putting stance may make some folks think I am trying to make friends with the grass or insects crawling on it.  I merely need to drop past the vulnerable spot that my back could decide is lock-down mode.  And I am the only one who can tell where that spot is.  And it can be found by surprise at any time during any movement; it's on the golf course that I have prepared protective moves.

Several men in my golf group are more than twenty-five years my senior, and in some cases, they are quite obviously more agile and less in pain than I am.  At times I say I anticipate playing golf until perhaps my mid-nineties, then expiring peacefully following a satisfying round on the greens.  (This I call, the Bing Crosby exit but he did it at the age of seventy.)  In reality, there are many days now, in my late sixties, when I wonder whether I can handle the pain for even another decade.  And I am basically a positive and optimistic person!  It astounds me that people who are already immobilized with injuries, deformities or various ailments can go on each day looking forward to many more years of life.  My own pains are often enough to make me feel that getting a great deal older is not necessarily desirable.  When I hear someone say about a deceased loved one that "...he is now at peace," I automatically think only of the fact that the departed one "is now without pain."

Please take the time to listen to someone who is trying to describe his or her pain, and perhaps you can help a little by merely taking one of the above approaches of commiserating, sympathizing or even empathizing if the described pain is at all familiar in tone.  The person talking about the pain apparently needs to reach out for that human tenderness from others.  Why not give it?  As for my own pains, I prefer not to dwell on them on any frequent basis.  This effort today to discuss pain in general is probably all I will have to say about it until the next time someone who doesn't yet know me very well asks me, "Why do you get down so close to the ground when you putt?"