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How
to describe your pain?
On
July 10 I was hit by a frightening pain in my left leg. I
wasn’t able to substantially reduce the pain even with a
large dose of anesthetic. When asked by a physician to
describe my pain, I struggled, all what came to my mind
was the toothache. (At least, in Croatia they don’t ask
you, not yet, that idiotic question to grade your pain on
the scale from 1 to 10, like you have a chip installed for
that.).
No
wonder, the title How to Talk About Pain in the NY
Times of July 12 caught my eye. And yes, Joanna Bourke in
that Sunday review puts into prospective why we all
struggle to describe a pain. |
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from
How to Talk About Pain by Joanna Bourke
NY Times, July 12, 2014
In
1926, Virginia Woolf published an essay on pain, "On
Being Ill". Isn’t it extraordinary, she observed,
that pain does not rank with "love, battle and
jealousy" among the most important themes in
literature. She lamented the "poverty of the language
of pain". Every schoolgirl who falls in love
"has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for
her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head
to a doctor and language at once runs dry".
Where
are the novels or epic poems devoted to typhoid, pneumonia
or toothaches, Woolf wondered? Instead, the person in pain
is forced to "coin words himself, and, taking his
pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other
(as perhaps the inhabitants of Babel did in the
beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new
word in the end drops out".
The
difficulty in talking about painful sensations forces
people to draw on metaphors, analogies and metonymies when
attempting to communicate their suffering to others. Woolf
— writing nearly a century after the popularization of
ether, the first anesthetic — was perhaps too
pessimistic about the creativity of sufferers. Take lower
back pain, the single leading cause of disability
worldwide. In the 1950s, one sufferer of back pain said
that it felt like "a raging toothache — sometimes
like something is moving or crawling down my legs". |
