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An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache
by Paula Kamen
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Indeed, the subject of chronic pain--full of mysteries and
unimaginably endless suffering--would fascinate with its stories of people with
phantom pain in limbs that had been cut off years before. Sometimes they would
even feel the sensation of nails digging into palms that no longer existed. The
topic would capture my imagination with the accounts of the rare children born
without the ability to feel pain, which isn't as fortunate of a thing as you
would at first suppose, as pain can actually give you useful warnings. Such
children would almost always die early in life, after years of tearing up their
bodies by doing something as simple as jumping off a swing too hard. Just as too
little pain was bad, I learned, so was too much of it. I would think about what
it must be like to go on with pain that was not "acute" (temporary),
but "chronic" (from the Greek word chronos: "concerning time,
constant, continuous"), meaning that despite having no apparent medical
purpose at all, it wouldn't go away.
My resulting science project--a report and a thick three-paneled
poster board display, which I recently dug out of my parents' attic--reveals that
I really got the drama of it all. On the middle board is the title, with the
words "Chronic Pain" spelled out in twisting white wire garbage bag
ties colored with a red marker. "Most of us well know what pain is and
experience it quite often," reads the carefully printed explanation below,
which was laid out on four strips of white construction paper pasted onto a red
square, "but in the United States alone, for 40,000,000 people constant
pain is a way of life. Here are some of the main ways people use to cope with
their agony." I illustrated the intricacies of the nervous system with a
diagram of nerves made of dried spaghetti noodles and a spinal cord of Styrofoam
vertebrae, probably cut out of a disposable cooler, connected by a spine of blue
drinking straws.
On the surrounding white poster board I had illustrated
different remedies. One was "drugs," signified by a bulbous jar
labeled "opium" and surrounded by a smattering of road-safety
signs-"do not enter," "caution," "yield"--cut out
of my mother's driver's ed book. I knew this was the most basic tool, as
scientists had found traces of morphine in mummies unearthed from thousands of
years ago. I also displayed another ancient method, acupuncture, using a
photocopied line drawing of a hefty goateed warrior standing resolutely, his
body dotted with acupuncture points. On display below was a vial of real
acupuncture needles. But I had more license to play with the biofeedback machine
on the table, which literally provided audio and visual feedback to a patient
about the effectiveness of certain tension-reducing techniques. Demonstrating
the machine required the use of an electricity-conducting pad from my limited
stash. I would peel away a tab to expose the pad's side of sticky gel, which
gave off a bitter odor of alcohol and petroleum combined. Then I would affix the
pad to my forehead, plug the biofeedback machine's arm into the pad, and then
contort the forehead at will. The machine, which resembled a professional
version of a transistor radio, with its tiny bulbs and dials and handsome black
carrying case, beeped in proportion to the tension levels I was creating.
But the pièce de résistance was an "interactive"
board game, "The Control of Chronic Pain." The game's mission was
serious, the players taking the perspective of someone trying to achieve pain
relief; but the format was whimsical, ripped off from Candyland. The players,
using a cardboard playing piece of a human figure, the kind that you see on
public men's room doors, advanced along the steps of an upwardly curving path of
blue footprints, with the ultimate destination point designated by the label
"Pain Is Under Control." The players were escaping the villain, Pain,
who was personified by three cardboard thieves who were pasted to the game board
and who wore masks and stood in suspicious, hunched-over, lurking poses. A sign
on the board explained the premise: "Wanted: PAIN. Charge: Hurting Millions
of People. Reward: Relief." After rolling the dice, the players moved
forward to spaces that gave further instructions, all soberly realistic, such as
"Try to stop villain by surgically taking him out of nerve. It works. But
there is numbness. Stay where you are." Another: "Advise a helpful
drug to the victim. The victim gets addicted. Move back two spaces." The
moral was illustrated by another sign on the board: "Pain Doesn't
Pay!"
From the preface to All In My Head, pages ix - xvi. Copyright Paula Kamen 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Da Capo Press.
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