On Corporal Pain

Today I want to write about pain, pain as I have felt through my body.

Two days ago I spent the day wracked with back pain. When I am suffering back pain, it is as if someone has inserted six knobs into my back, three on either side of the spine, roughly ten centimeters apart. The pain comes when they twist these knobs and my muscles tighten accordingly into whirlpools of intricately fragile and familiar pain.

At one point, a few years ago, the pain was so chronic that I would find it difficult to walk without being in tears. I missed a lot of my university lectures during this time.

One day, I came back after a week or so of being absent and a newly found friend joked, ‘Where have you been, you slacker?’ Through gritted teeth I told him about that awful visitor of mine, good old Mister Pain.

The peculiar thing about Mister Pain is that at times he is like what one would call in Indonesian, a customer of ‘kupu-kupu malam’ or ‘butterflies of the night’: a common term for sex workers. Perhaps the analogy isn’t quite clear? Hah! I mean that Mr. Pain is there one minute and then, once having sated himself with my agonizing body* , gone the next, without a trace.

During a particularly intense day’s worth of searing pain coursing through my flesh, I decided to miss an in-class test for my Social Work degree. The following day, the pain having spent himself with me and then miraculously gone on his way, I turned up to class fresh and beaming.

A classmate who did not know the nature of my back pain asked me where I had been. Not wanting to go into details, I simply said, ‘I was sick yesterday.’ She looked me up and down and remarked quietly, ‘You don’t look sick.’

I felt like I had just been slapped in the face.

I remembered completing a course on Sociology of Health and Illness, in which we had discussed ‘playing the sick role’. By this we meant needing to ‘act sick’, in order for other members of society to believe one to be so and act accordingly, e.g. an employer seeing an employee turn up to work with a runny nose, a haggard face and complaining of a headache, would acquiesce for the employee to take the day off.

I felt as if by her comments, this woman had demanded that I perform my sickness to her, demonstrate and prove it. ‘Give me a valid reason for you having missed that test’: essentially was what had been communicated to me.

I found this outrageous at the time, especially given the kind of pain I had just gone through and the elation I felt at having been rid of it, at least for the time being. And now I felt as if I needed to wallow in that pain just for someone else’s benefit?

Does this mean that I regarded my pain as a private matter? It is true that I tried to be aware of when I spoke of my pain to others or not. I was aware that it could be tiring to have to listen to a friend speak of their pain so constantly and so regularly, even though the reality was that the pain was there constantly and regularly.

Once, when I sighed yet again and commented briefly about my back pain, a friend said somewhat impatiently, ‘You’re always in pain! Go and have it checked!’ Although she meant well, I think she was also communicating that it was starting to become challenging having to listen to me moan and groan everyday.

I suppose in a sense this shows that shared pain does not necessarily mean lessened pain. Or maybe it is an example of how sharing in someone else’s pain can lead to burn-out quite quickly, so there is a need to replenish oneself somehow when one is caring for someone experiencing chronic pain.

I have to say, this past week when the battle reignited, I felt pretty lucky. Having been in the company of my mother, it was she who tended to me when I woke during the night with my back screaming out and making it impossible to sleep. I woke her with a desperate, ‘Ma…!’ She was immediately alert and her voice dripped with worry.

In the middle of the night, my mother tenderly placed strips of ‘koyo’, a menthol-based solvent commonly used in Indonesia to ease muscle tenderness. She also prepared a hot water bottle that she rolled up and down my back whilst massaging me gently.

What was funny was that whilst my mother was preoccupied with the 23-year-old version of the small body that had grown inside her own, I was busy wondering what kind of pain she was going through seeing her daughter in pain.

This was almost enough of a distraction for me to forget the knobs turning within my flesh.

NOTE: *This is not to say that all sex workers find their work ‘agonizing’ at all times, with all of their customers.