The first time I recognized that an adult had lied to me, I had just turned six years old. I wasn’t sick enough to lose the feistiness of a first grader, so I demanded over and over to know whether or not a group of pediatricians was going to stick a needle in me. No, they’d say, trying to get me to calm down and hold still, and they’d stick me anyway. A gossamer tube in my right hand would slowly go red as I summoned my best death stare.
After the third or fourth time, I realized that this wasn’t a choice. But I still wanted the comfort of knowledge, to know when to steel myself. A semblance of control for a consolation prize. My mother recalls the creepiness of seeing my eyes roll back into my head and my body fall slack as I went under for surgery—even if this was a commonplace image for her, even if the only reason she could stay with me overnight was that she worked as a nurse in a different branch of the same hospital. Over a period of seven days, I had a few minor procedures. The first two were to excise some obscure infection that had spread from my nose to my jaw, and the third involved the insertion of a Broviac catheter for antibiotics.
I haven’t thought about any of it in a very long time. It’s not until I examine my own sternum as the prospective space for a tattoo that I notice a scar I’d forgotten on my left breast: like a series of half-popped air bubbles, waxy and fragmented, nearly invisible now. I don’t remember any real pain.
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A hand against my chest carves a fair warning: my two prison-versions of this were simply practice. I don’t remember them hurting in college, but I am reminded that this pain will be “more spicy.” Then the real thing drops in like a thin vertical line, sunk deep with a grappling hook. But I don’t flinch, I don’t grimace. I’ve asked for this in the way I ask for everything: with a closed fist.
Did you know that deliberately-inflicted pain hurts more?
At some point along the several hours I’ve surrendered myself flat on the parlor’s plastic, I think of this part from Stephanie LaCava’s novel I Fear My Pain Interests You. Margot, the protagonist, is a punk band nepo-baby and has a rare, somewhat glamorous disease that renders her immune to physical pain. As dangerous as the disease is, it’s hard not to imagine it as a superpower. “Graves,” a man she meets towards the end of the novel, is fascinated by it, having studied neuroscience at some point in his rather shady past. The study he references might be this one from Harvard University in 2008:
It has long been known that our own mental states can alter the experience of pain, but these findings suggest that our perceptions of the mental states of others can also influence how we feel pain.
“This study shows that even if two harmful events are physically identical, the one delivered with the intention to hurt actually hurts more,” says Gray. “If it’s an accidental harm, chances are it’s a one-time thing, and there’s no need to do anything about it. If it’s an intentional harm, however, it may be the first of many, so it’s good to take notice and do something about it. It makes sense that our bodies and brains might amplify our experience of pain when we know that the pain could signal threats to our survival.”
I’m not sure how the Harvard theory might apply to paying a professional to stick you with a needle. The gestures are meticulous, calculated, and absolutely deliberate, yet mean no harm. This is my brain’s little conundrum for the hour, a welcome diversion from the buzz of the needle.
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There’s a lot of dead space to think, to remember. When the artist revises a line of the tattoo in orange sharpie, I return to a buried scene from childhood, from not long after I had the Broviac line removed. It begins with my babysitter taking a quick shower, leaving my brother and me unsupervised for five or so minutes. We squabble over something and start dueling with miniature Sharpies. My brother pokes me with one in the chest, the same place where the artist is drawing now. It leaves a permanent mark on a dress my grandmother handmade to match my doll’s, this pilled cotton thing, floral and shapeless, not unlike a hospital gown. I become so enraged that I stab him back. The sharpie’s point buries no more than a centimeter from his eye. Deliberately-inflicted pain: both of us scream and weep. I wonder whether this is the most violent thing I’ve ever done to date. I certainly never lived it down.
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I’m afraid of needles as much as the average person, now—no more, no less. But like anyone, it is difficult for me to lie still and mentally prepare myself for pain. The drill moving towards a tooth, the pressure of a wax strip on a lip, the gentle just breathe, 1…2…3… that strikes fear into any heart. At the gallery, my boss shows me how to flip the breaker switch for the AC, and I watch him recoil after shocking himself. The next day it is nearly impossible to get my hand to touch it, for the blind fear of oncoming pain.
Reading LaCava’s fictional account of CIPA produced an odd envy in me. I wonder if my lifelong anxiety surrounding pain had something to do with my perceived inability to handle it, especially when I knew it was coming. I despised that bright, suspended moment between stubbing a toe and waiting for the agony to arrive—how luxurious it would be to know that it never would. That pain was only a figment of the imagination, to be shrugged off and forgotten; to be cast aside, left unnoticed. To resist falling down its abyss struck me as a type of transcendence.
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Halfway through our session, I ask the artist where the most painful place to get a tattoo might be. It varies from person to person, but in terms of popular places, probably the sternum or the ribs. So, I guess, this. I find the best way to endure the sting—in terms of holding still and not letting my vision black out—is to distract myself with private self-congratulation. Thank god I am so tough and brave!
My courage is only comparative. There was a time I would have fainted at the mere mention of blood and needles, like a frail Victorian child. This behavior made me a very obnoxious elementary schooler, difficult to manage in almost any setting, with frequent trips to the nurse’s office for phantom illnesses which were readily classified as attention-seeking patterns. I was always dizzy and nauseous, especially in any situation that felt even mildly unfamiliar or out of my control. Any regular fun activity for children, like going down a slide or scrambling up a tree, felt insurmountable for visions of spilled blood and broken limbs. Diary of a Very Wimpy Kid: I became very stubborn in my commitment to non-participation. Lame, as my brother would say.
This had only begun after my hospitalization, of course. There was nothing like being admitted to the ER on a stretcher and looking up to see the fear on my mother’s face: It’s not like I’m gonna die, I’d said, and she had not reassured me otherwise, this being the type of situation where an adult lie might have come in handy.1 I felt I’d become acutely aware of my own mortality in this brief interaction. Too young, too impressionable, when everything was precarious—the complete end of the world.
Yet I’ll admit that, beneath a layer of constant terror that I remember as real, my panic scenes probably were a ploy for attention. Perhaps even more than my perceived flirtation with death, I remembered how my temporary frailty had invited showers of coveted Beanie Babies and visitations from teachers, neighbors, parents of friends, and even my father who lived far away at the time. For that very short window of time—an eternity in my six-year-old brain—I could have absolutely anything I wanted. I was brought Lindy’s Italian Ice in bed, I was excused from homework because I had an IV attached to my writing hand, I could watch The Adventures of Milo & Otis on repeat in my hospital room, and my mother even took it upon herself to sleep next to me every night. In short, I was spoiled. I was never alone. And the best part was that, unlike several other children in that wing of the hospital, I would eventually get to go home. You were so brave, all the adults would say to me, although I never was brave again.
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When I return home from the tattoo session, the adhesive of the second skin produces a slight pang, almost a weight, and I’m unable to lie on my stomach or hold anything close to my chest for fear of damaging it. I watch in the mirror as ink, blood, and plasma weep and froth beneath the thin plastic. I think again of the Broviac—my phantom breastplate of tubes and bandages, all of those nights spent on my back in the bottom bunk of my childhood bedroom. An exquisite itch—easy to feel, impossible to touch. It still feels somehow indulgent to think about, but it no longer causes me any fear.
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Caught somewhere between raw terror and Romance, my short-lived illness had been my obsession for years on end. But I eventually became concious enough to recognize that everyone was sick of my attempts to relive it. Attention-seeking gave way to embarrassment, and I became better at hiding my aversions. Little by little, by pretending I wasn’t petrified to see my blood get extracted into a syringe in order to not appear weak or difficult, I could believe that nothing was so bad after all. What had happened to me once was a true anomaly—I was fine, and I would always be fine. I first learned coping, self-soothing, a sort of bracing, and later numb apathy.
I finally conquered one of my last fears a few summers ago, when I went to the emergency room with a misdiagnosis of appendicitis. I kept refusing the IV. It was pure instinct: I’d done the same when I’d had my wisdom teeth removed, instead opting to ingest liquid Zofran once I became nauseous from the novocaine shots. The doctor was just as confused as the oral surgeon. Aren’t you in pain? It’s the only way we can give you morphine. After some cajoling, I finally gave in simply for the delightful prospect of being on hard drugs. If the pain could subside, perhaps the fear would. The IV was my old bedside companion, anyway. Mind over matter—I’d get one again in a heartbeat.
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For Margot, the concept of pain is not impenetrable. Although there is none in her body, she is not immune to a childhood of neglect, poisonous relationships with older men, and her mother’s suicide—her volatile mental state can still be described in the vocabulary of pain: heartache, agony, and torture.
Graves again: the circuitry for physical and emotional pain is the same.
The two could be described as twins, perhaps bunkmates in the brain. The feeling of both seem to have so much overlap, one easily giving way to another, that the only way to distinguish physical and emotional pain is perhaps to identify an original cause. We split hairs to decide whether or not an ailment is real, worth encountering, treating, or voicing.
From Jesse Meadows’ “Ritual Medicine”:
“Psychosomatic” has become a bad word in the world of chronic pain, and I know why. It feels like you’re being told it’s not real, but what happens in your head happens in your body, too. There’s no separation. The phenomenon is biological. The body is the experience.
The dynamic between my body and mind had become tangled so long ago that it seemed pointless to parse them apart. Nails pulling against my clavicle was rejection, ghostly pinpricks through my limbs was devastation. A lance through my stomach: missing someone. A dull ache in my muscles could come from any type of sadness.
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