Table of Contents
ALSO BY PAULA KAMEN
Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution
Feminist Fatale: Voices from the Twentysomething
Generation Explore the Future of the Womens Movement
For My Parents
and
Dedicated to the Memory of
My Friend Iris
NOTE: This book was NOT made possible by an unrestricted educational grant from Merck, Allergan, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Endo Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Upjohn, Purdue Pharma, OrthoMcNeil, Bayer, Advil, or the icepack industry. Really.
PREFACE
A Burning Bush in Gary, Indiana (1979)
I could interpret the strange fact that the title of my sixth-grade science project was The Control of Chronic Pain, and that I later developed years of constant pain (felt primarily as a dagger of criminal nerves behind the left eye), in one of two ways:
1. Its just a coincidence. No connection. There is no real system of meaning in the universe. After all, Im hardly unique. More than a quarter of all Americans experience some form of chronic pain each year, and about 20 percent of women have migraines or some type of persistent headache, a term I have used as shorthand to name my particular mystery affliction. For Gods sake, the headache is the most common medical condition plaguing human beings! And there you have it.
OR
2. You see, the New Agers, much of the alternative medicine and self-help industry, and all those psychoanalysts are right. All pain has some meaning. Everything in life happens for a reason, so we can grow. There are no accidents. The sixth-grade science project was a clear sign from God or Spirit or the Higher Power of Your Understanding that all along I was meant to experience these headaches, learn from them, and then teach others to relieve their suffering.
More specifically, as I interpret this second popular philosophy, we are each basically nothing more than ageless, continually reincarnating souls on an eternal mission for enlightenment, seeking to learn the vital and often painful lessons that our previous selves neglected. Just before we are born, our invisible spirits, just released from dead people, hover in the twilightsomewhere between the clouds and heavenwaiting for the next baby, which will represent their next and most effective learning opportunity. Then, at the proper moment, like synchronized swimmers lined up on a long series of diving boards by the pools edge in a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical, they each seamlessly dive sideways and gracefully in cascading sequence into their individually designated earthly human containers.
So, from this perspective, what evidently happened to me was that on the day I was born, April 9, 1967, my particular soul looked down and had the foresight, as souls often do, to choose my unassuming bourgeois South Suburban Chicago human life-form. It knew that, through a series of hapless errors in judgment and general misfortune, this bipedal hominid would offer the soul the perfect opportunity to fulfill its particular mission: having a really, really bad headache.
In its infinite wisdom, the soul recognized that I would grow up with an anesthesiologist uncle who started one of the earlier chronic pain clinics in America, in Gary, Indianaa land mass which is comparable in its cosmic power significance only to the sacred continental energy-vortex center underlying the Great Pyramid of Giza, or to that freaky thing in Sedona that attracts all those tourists. At the age of twelve, a traditional age of initiation into the world, my uncle would suggest as a topic for my sixth-grade science project chronic pain, offering valuable foreshadowing. That science project would serve as my own personal burning bush, as a platform on which the Divine could manifest itself on earth and alert me to my purpose.
The soul knew that despite the initially apparent dry nature of this topic of chronic pain, its mysteries would soon powerfully capture my imagination. After all, it posed so many more haunting and mesmerizing questions than the garden variety projects of my classmates, what with their pedestrian baking-soda volcanoes and hamster-perplexing mazes.
I was drawn to the topic of pain the same way I was to the riveting made-for-TV John Travolta movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble of that era, about the freakishness that results when the body goes awry. It had the same pull as the horrible, terrorizing historical accounts of Jewish girls my age hiding from the Nazis, such as in the Scholastic book Marta and the Nazis, which was most likely ordered from the back of a Weekly Reader, about a German girl stashing the family diamonds in the head of a doll she carried away in the train going over the border. And then there was the story of the more famous real-life Dutch girl hiding in an attic covered in movie posters, in a story still too dark for me to fully comprehend. Probably Catholic kids feel the same weird connection to tales of martyred saints riddled with arrows, sleeping on piles of bricks, wearing gloves filled with nettles, and/or willingly starving themselves to death. They just eat that stuff up.
Indeed, the subject of chronic painfull of mysteries and unimaginably endless sufferingwould fascinate with its stories of people with phantom pain in limbs that had been cut off years before. Sometimes they would even feel the sensation of nails digging into palms that no longer existed. The topic would capture my imagination with the accounts of the rare children born without the ability to feel pain, which isnt as fortunate of a thing as you would at first suppose, as pain can actually give you useful warnings. Such children would almost always die early in life, after years of tearing up their bodies by doing something as simple as jumping off a swing too hard. Just as too little pain was bad, I learned, so was too much of it. I would think about what it must be like to go on with pain that was not acute (temporary), but chronic (from the Greek word chronos: concerning time, constant, continuous), meaning that despite having no apparent medical purpose at all, it wouldnt go away.
My resulting science projecta report and a thick three-paneled poster board display, which I recently dug out of my parents atticreveals that I really got the drama of it all. On the middle board is the title, with the words Chronic Pain spelled out in twisting white wire garbage bag ties colored with a red marker. Most of us well know what pain is and experience it quite often, reads the carefully printed explanation below, which was laid out on four strips of white construction paper pasted onto a red square, but in the United States alone, for 40,000,000 people constant pain is a way of life. Here are some of the main ways people use to cope with their agony. I illustrated the intricacies of the nervous system with a diagram of nerves made of dried spaghetti noodles and a spinal cord of Styrofoam vertebrae, probably cut out of a disposable cooler, connected by a spine of blue drinking straws.
On the surrounding white poster board I had illustrated different remedies. One was drugs, signified by a bulbous jar labeled opium and surrounded by a smattering of road-safety signsdo not enter, caution, yieldcut out of my mothers drivers ed book. I knew this was the most basic tool, as scientists had found traces of morphine in mummies unearthed from thousands of years ago. I also displayed another ancient method, acupuncture, using a photocopied line drawing of a hefty goateed warrior standing resolutely, his body dotted with acupuncture points. On display below was a vial of real acupuncture needles. But I had more license to play with the biofeedback machine on the table, which literally provided audio and visual feedback to a patient about the effectiveness of certain tension-reducing techniques. Demonstrating the machine required the use of an electricity-conducting pad from my limited stash. I would peel away a tab to expose the pads side of sticky gel, which gave off a bitter odor of alcohol and petroleum combined. Then I would affix the pad to my forehead, plug the biofeedback machines arm into the pad, and then contort the forehead at will. The machine, which resembled a professional version of a transistor radio, with its tiny bulbs and dials and handsome black carrying case, beeped in proportion to the tension levels I was creating.
