Pain Management Clinic

Half an hour ago I received a call from the Chronic Pain Care Center , they just had a cancellation and would I like to come in tomorrow at 8 a. m.? My answer was an immediate yes, the two month wait to see them has now become little more than half a day.

They had sent me a series of questionnaires about my pain, my health, my attitude that I was going to answer in June; so I had to do them this afternoon. To question closely the specifics of pain is unsettling, like most people I had made a mental accommodation, a day to day way of handling this thing, my special way; now I have described it by questionnaires for medical and psychological doctors. All my previous accommodations are upset and would like to be back to their almost once comfortable positions.

This is my first professional visit to pain specialists; not only do I expect that they have all the possible modes of handling whatever it is that I have, there is the thought that if they don’t have an answer, the answer, then I am in trouble. I have been avoiding, denying that my pain may be impossible to relieve, the rheumatism or fibromyalgia pain; in the back of my mind there was the belief that there is a cure, but if I don’t search for it I can maintain that belief, that fiction. That notion is about to be tested.

Now that I have put the idea down here, that there is or is not an answer I can see that there will probably be a complex answer, things that will relieve the pain and things that will assist me living with whatever pain is left over. This is not an uncomfortable afternoon.

A series of questions has to do with my significant other , they are insistent that I list someone in my life to whom I turn, this isn’t an easy question. I saw in the paper that a recent survey found just over half of all women are single, from that I assume that a fair number live alone, are divorced. For every divorced woman there has to have been a divorced man: that means there are is a big bunch of divorced guys out here, and many of them are not living with someone else, many of us have parents who are dead, more than a few are alienated from their children, or never had any, perhaps don’t have a close friend, haven’t had a close friend since they growing up. I don’t think that I am alone in having trouble naming this significant other person. I mention only men because that is what I happen to be part of, if someone wrote that there are a large number of women who would have trouble with that question I wouldn’t be surprised.

About a decade ago I had to go to an Emergency Room at 3 a. m. I had thought that there is nothing lonelier than going to the E. R. alone at 3 in the morning. Even when I had a wife who didn’t like me she would have felt it her duty to go with me; I think that there are a number of situations where an unhappy spouse gives in to duty, I remember when I did it for her, she for me. Now I sit alone.

I volunteer to sit with people who are about to die, I have yet to have a situation where there is a spouse present; children often are in denial about the situation, are present physically but not fully. There can be nothing fucking lonelier than sitting someplace and waiting to die; yet it is a necessary, the necessary, act of our life. It can be described as the second most common act, the first being when we become alive. I sit with these people in order that their loneliness is lessened.

Several people have commented that I have been writing about weird stuff, that I have difficulty writing about everyday things. Yes, that’s the truth. Is there anything more everyday than the knowledge that I am alive but someday will not be? I guess that I am writing weird stuff, and so what?

It is a beautiful spring afternoon in Chicago, daffodils and tulips are spots of strong color after months of gray and brown smudges. Almost everyone I have talked with in the last few days has mentioned how much they are enjoying our spring; it doesn’t last for long, but that makes it even more precious.

That is all I have time for now, it is time to open a beer and cook some orange roughy fillets, fingerling potatoes, green pepper, broccoli, a fair amount of olive oil and garlic are about to be ingested by this occasionally weird guy; there may be a third beer tonight.