Do You Hurry to Outrun the Pain?
/By Carol Levy
I'm infused with impatience. I do everything fast.
I used to swim at the YMCA. I didn’t feel like I was moving quickly, but to others I was a speeding bullet knifing through the water. As soon as I stopped, to make my turn at the end of the lane, invariably someone watching would yell down at me, “What's your rush? Isn't it more fun if you enjoy it?”
Not for me. It's not just the physicality of moving swiftly through the water, which for me is a wonderful feeling. More important is getting to the end of the mile of swimming I try to complete, before something happens to trigger my pain.
I can't tolerate touch to the left side of my face, due to trigeminal neuralgia and phantom pain. Just the idea of a droplet of water touching my face terrorizes me, so I only do the backstroke.
One day a man asked me, “Is that the only stroke you know? I could teach you others.”
I didn't want to explain why I only did the backstroke, so I shrugged my shoulders and swam away.
The backstroke works for me because my arms move in such a way that they don't fire off bullets of water that might hit my face. Regardless, I am always at the mercy of the thought, “Be careful! Finish this before you get hit in the face with a droplet.”
I'm impatient because I have to outrun the pain. I get to the Y early, impatient to get into the pool before others, so no one gets in the lanes next to me and splashes water on my face.
This is true of almost every aspect of my life. I shop fast because using my eyes too much triggers the pain. The faster I go through a store, the less opportunity I have to see things I want to see, but did not come to buy.
On rare occasions, I get sidetracked. I forget. I start to look at what else they have. My eyes start to travel up and down the shelves, and the pain grows to such heights that I fear my ability to get out of the store and drive home safely. So, I rush.
Before my trigeminal neuralgia, I loved to read. I could read a whole book in a few hours. And as soon as I finished, like the joke about eating Chinese food, I'd be hungry to start a new one.
Now I can read only a few pages at a time, skipping words, paragraphs, pages, looking for the dialogue that essentially explains the story. Who the main characters are and what their relationships are with each other, are lost to me.
I am impatient to get to the end. Not to see who the murderer is (I love mysteries the best), but to get to the end quickly, so the pain doesn't interfere.
I could go on and on with other examples, but they don't matter. At the end of the day, they all boil down to one thing: Hurry up! Hurry up! The pain is coming! The pain has started!
But I have to get to the end. The end of the swimming lane, the grocery list, and the end of the book.
There are changes we all go through, no matter our circumstances. But I think pain sufferers change more than most people -- and the changes are largely the result of trying to outrun the pain. It’s an impatience that’s very hard for those without pain to understand.
As for me? I used to be the tortoise. Now I'm the hare. Right now, I'm hurrying to finish writing this column before the pain takes over from using my eyes so much.
Pain makes me rabbit my way through life. The tortoise, ambling by, gets to look at the scenery. The hare in us makes it hard to stop and smell the roses.
Carol Jay Levy has lived with trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic facial pain disorder, for over 30 years. She is the author of “A Pained Life, A Chronic Pain Journey.” Carol is the moderator of the Facebook support group “Women in Pain Awareness.” Her blog “The Pained Life” can be found here.