Laura K. Curtis's Blog, page 21

On the Indescribable Nature of Pain

Pain is a peculiar thing, at the same time universal and utterly individual. If I say I am hungry, most people have a general sense of what I mean. If I say I am tired, they can probably not only sympathize, but empathize. But if I tell you my back hurts, or I have a toothache…

Pain, though physical in nature, is more like an emotion. We have qualifiers–stabbing, throbbing, radiating, shooting–and doctors will often ask you to rank your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, but even that’s not particularly effective at explaining to someone else what it is you feel. After all, who says our scales are at all similar? When I told an ER intake nurse one time that my pain level was an eight, she said, “EIGHT? No one comes in as an eight…everyone who walks through those doors is a ten.”

And chances are, a couple of years before that incident, I’d have rated my pain a ten, too. But in 2001, I had a perforated appendix and ended up septic with peritonitis. On the day I called 911 it was literally the only thing I could do. The operator got my address from my phone–I am not sure I could have remembered it to give to her. She asked if the door was unlocked. I couldn’t move off the floor to see.

My pain scale changed that day. Ten now is physically blinding, as in the pain is so bad that black spots show up all over your field of vision. Or it is for me. I’m not at all certain you’d have the same reaction.

People I trust–both friends and medical professionals–tell me I have a very high pain tolerance. But I don’t think that’s true. Comparing my reactions to other people’s, I think I am sort of missing some levels on the pain scale. That is, I have 1-4, but then 5-7 just continue to register as 4 and the next thing you know I am screaming because I am at 8.

If I truly had a high tolerance, I wouldn’t be so anxious to get to the doctor and get rid of the pain, would I? Wouldn’t I just sort of grit my teeth and go on? Stoicism is SO not my thing. Once I get to the pain, I want drugs. Immediately.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently because last Sunday, I woke up in excruciating pain. Like whoa, mama, I’m just going to lie here and cry for a few minutes pain. I didn’t go to the ER because I didn’t feel…sick. Broken. I can’t explain it except to say that nothing I felt inside my body made me think I couldn’t make it until the next day when I could get in to see my doctor. I had a couple of pain pills left over from oral surgery earlier this years, so between those and enough Aleve to completely destroy my liver, Sunday passed.

After several docs and some really good painkillers and X-rays and an MRI, it turns out I have a herniated cervical disc. (And another problem with a thoracic disc, but I’ve had that on and off for 20 years, I can’t worry about it now.) There’s a piece of the disc that’s broken off and wedged itself oh-so-inconveniently against the nerve that runs down my right arm and into my hand causing weakness, numbness, and holy cow pain.

It is, as the neurosurgeon told me yesterday, a mechanical problem that will, in all likelihood, require a mechanical solution, aka spinal surgery. But he encouraged me to try other things first–acupuncture, epidurals, PT, traction–because in some cases, if you can manage the pain long enough, in six months to a year, the fragments will take care of themselves.

Since I don’t like the idea of anyone cutting into my back, I will certainly try. But the idea of managing pain for a year on the off chance it could resolve itself isn’t terribly appealing.

In the meantime, I have newfound respect for all those romantic suspense heroes and heroines who get up to sexytimes while near death from bullet wounds and field surgery.

And if I see you at RWA, please don’t slap me on the back to congratulate me.

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New Business Cards!

In a few weeks, with a little luck, I will be rolling out a new website. This blog will still be right where it is, but at the moment when you go to laurakcurtis.com it just redirects you to the blog–that won’t happen anymore. Instead, there will be a whole actual site. Freaky, right? But I worked with a designer (have I mentioned I have no design sense) and we have picked the key image we’ll be using, which means I can make coordinated business cards. So here’s what my new cards will look like!

That’s the full bleed. The actual trim will be a bit smaller.

What do you guys think? Fun, right?

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Politics, Unusual.

The only Senate I usually talk about.

Once upon a time, in the early days of blogging, back when you had to install software on a server to have a blog, I had one. It was required for my job as an admin for an academic computing lab. I hated it. I felt as if I had nothing to say and no one was listening. Which was mostly true in the beginning. But when I left the job, I kept the blog. It became a place for me to vent, and my venting in those days was highly political. I was living in Texas and then in Boston and I had a lot to say about both local and national politics.

But then life took a turn, as it does, and I started having trouble keeping track of even basic things. My epilepsy meds were failing, though I didn’t know it at the time, and I didn’t have the brainpower to keep track of bills or candidates, let alone write coherently about them.

So the blog went away.

When I got back to blogging, lots of things had changed. I had a new career, a new focus. And the Internet had changed, too. The trolls had invaded, and I had no intention of inviting them into my private space. So I kept my blogging to relatively innocuous—or so I thought*—topics, along with the occasional book review. (*It was during this period, when I think my work was probably as inoffensive as it’s ever been, that I garnered my one and only Cease and Desist letter. You never can tell what people will try to shut you up over, apparently. Which was when I learned that the only appropriate response to an out of line C&D is to post said letter. It was a valuable lesson.)

Nowadays, part of my consulting work is to talk to writers about marketing, branding, and social media. I always, always tell them to stay away from hot-button topics unless those topics are integral to their writing and they’re building a certain platform.

Over the past 24 hours on Twitter I have repeatedly ignored my own advice, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

First and most obviously, because the topics under discussion—women’s access to healthcare and control of their own reproductive systems, and equal rights for LGBT folks—are near and dear to my heart. But there is more to it than that.

Twitter, I think, is a venue that seems fleeting. It appears as if you can drop your words into the Tweetstream and they will be carried away in a way they will not on a blog or even on Facebook. There’s a tendency to feel as if they will disappear.

Of course, they don’t. Indeed, if you say something particularly on point, that tweet may be retweeted by people with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers. It may show up on someone else’s blog as a quote. It may show up on television as an example of the type of conversation people are having.

But when you’re on Twitter, you don’t think about that.

So last night I got called, among other things, a baby killer. (I’ve never killed a baby. Or even a fetus. Unless you count baby roaches. I have NO sympathy for roaches of any age.) And this morning I was told that I had ruined traditional marriage. (My husband says that’s probably true because I refuse to wear an apron and I hate ironing.)

But it’s all good. It’s nice to find that old voice and exercise it every once in a while, even if now it has to be put away again.

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A Young Writer

This week I was on vacation, and most of my talking was done with beach denizens like the one pictured above. But I also had a few conversation with family members. One of the best was with my niece, sitting at the very bench this mutt is occupying. My sister asked me when my book, Twisted, would be out, and my niece Leyla, who is 11, asked in some awe, “you wrote a book?” When I told her I had, she said:

Leyla: That’s so cool. I want to be a writer. But I know I need another job, too.

Me: That’s probably true. It’s hard to make money as a writer.

Leyla: I thought I could be a teacher. But that’s a hard job, too.

Me (having been a teacher for many years): Yes, it is. It doesn’t leave you a lot of time for writing.

Leyla: I could write in the summer.

Me: Well, that would be fine, depending on what kind of writing you want to do. But what if you have a deadline? For example, when I got my contract for the book coming out in November, it was for two books and I’d only written one of them. The other one is due September 1.

Leyla: And how’s that working out for you?

[After much laughter from the adults]

Leyla: Did you like writing your book?

Me: Sometimes. Sometimes not. Like when my editor said, ‘this stuff here doesn’t work at all. It has to go. Needs to be rewritten.’

Leyla: My teacher does that, too. [In her best "adult" voice] ‘Leyla, this part doesn’t flo-o-w.’

 

So, yeah, she’s well on her way to being a writer!

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