• Tag Archives pain

  • My Left Shoulder and How It Communicates

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                       Bloodroot Moon

    On Saturday the class with Scott Edelstein on marketing and selling books happened in a typical classroom setting, a meeting room of the Loft at their space at Open Book on Washington Avenue.  The room had a blackboard, a white board, exposed beams and brick walls, the usual rectangular tables and plastic chairs with backs.

    In the morning, fresh and eager, I leaned in or sat up, entranced by Scott’s revelation of a new world, publishing in the high electronic age.  At breaks I stretched and at lunch I visited the small deli cum coffee shop downstairs for lunch.  Another plastic chair.

    The time after lunch was long.  My nap went missing as the clock hit 1, then 2, then 3.  By 4 my shoulder had begun to ping me.  I don’t like this anymore.  Let’s leave.  Get outta here. Scram.

    Since the last part of the class involved romancing the agent, my intentions overrode my bodies urgent signals.  I stayed through the last word.  But I left immediately after it, went downstairs and headed home.

    Back home the shoulder felt like a small knife had been inserted just below the clavicle, nestling up next to the shoulder joint and pressed through all the way through to my back. It didn’t hurt in  sharp, glancing away sort of pain, but more in a subdued ache with–small flames like you used to use to decorate the model cars of your youth– flickering around the knife.  It’s agony, a soft agony, spread throughout the body, inviting other muscles to tense up, join in the attempt to isolate the pain, make it stay up there.  Having, of course, the opposite effect.

    Not fun.  Kate heated up a neck wrap and after two applications my shoulder settled down, rejoined the rest of the body and allowed as how I might go on with the rest of the evening.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Health Writing 📎and tagged

  • Pain

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    When a friend is in pain, the pain travels.  In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter.  Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we know about yet still hope will never be heard among the people we know and love.  Cancer.  It has such a brutal, dangerous, threatening aura.  Black.  Shot through with jagged points.  Hearing the word in the mouth of a friend sets the inner self back.  Creates a sense of fear and loss, loss even before any loss, a type of loss that may be the final stage of innocence, the end game of our immortality.

    Then there is turning to face the truth, to talk to the doctors, to sort out the words, the feelings, the possibilities, the dangers.  And choosing, choosing about matters of life and death. Decisions no amount of prayer or meditation or forethought prepare us for, decisions about our own life, its length, its end.  Or, worse, the life of a loved one.  Hope?  Of course, hope always has a role, a horse in the race.  But there are other horses, too.

    My heart has been heavy ever since I learned this news, an existential dread, the kind always there, under the surface, the knowing, the knowing about predatory nature.  Yes, she is our mother; yes, in all ways, yes; but, like Coatlicue of whom I wrote a few days ago, she not only gives life, but she takes it back.

    Cancer is not evil.  It has no intention.  It is.  It is a force majeur, an act of blind fate.  And yet.  We can, sometimes, turn it back.  Cancer’s aura has gotten a bit dimmer of late, a degree of lethal certainty has leaked away as drugs and drug regimens, research and surgery have chipped away at its powers.

    So, I invite you to do the kind of thing in which you believe for my friend’s wife.  A kind and generous universe will know how to direct your message.  We all need love, love from places we know and places we don’t.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Friends Health 📎and tagged

  • Night Talk

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    Though the pain has subsided, it still keeps me awake without medication.  So, I’m up at 6 am, a rarity for me these days.  When Kate shifts off regular work, no longer comes home around 10 pm, then I’ll go back to an earlier bed time and 6 might not be so unusual.

    I understand the attraction of the night.  I feel it myself.  The quiet, the dark has a friendly feel to it, a time when the home becomes a hermitage or a studio or a writing garret, far off from the demands of mundane life.  Reading late has an appeal, the book, the words float up and occupy the whole, not reading anymore, but traveling along, carried on a river of narrative.  Writing has the same free, anchors away momentum.  The ship sails away from the dock, following the rhythm of an ocean current, one that runs just along the border between the conscious and unconscious realm, between the warmer, busier, lighter waters near the surface and the benthic deeps, unvisited, stygian, fecund, down there the ocean reaches its source, the collective unconscious, yet deeper and universally expansive, the holy well from which archetypes, genetic memory, forces creative enough to bring life itself into existence make their slow way.

    Night talk.  Or, rather, very early morning talk.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Commentary on the news Faith and Spirituality Health Writing 📎and tagged

  • First Day Post Op

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                             Waning Strawberry Moon

    I went into see Kate this evening.  The first day post surgery can be brutal and it is this time.  A lot of pain.  She’s a stoic and the pain went well beyond her threshold .  It was hard to see, but I talked to the nurse and they adjusted her pain meds.   I’m going to call around 10:45, near the end of Clare’s shift, Kate’s nurse.  I want to know if things have gotten any better.

    On stupid things people do:  I saw a motorcyclist riding his bike, his mobile phone pinned to his ear by his left shoulder.

    Wanted to know what was going on in the head of the older red haired woman I passed.  She was behind the wheel of a bright yellow late model Volkswagen bug with plates that read:  Manilow.

    Drove behind a new Cadillac with the license plate:  NINES.  Won it in a poker game?


    📂This entry was posted in Family Health 📎and tagged