Idaho is a good state to be private in. No one remembers it is there, except that we are nearly all printing our messages on Hewlett Packard printers, along with some other pretty Idaho things. We just forget. Sort of like pain. Hardly noticed, but there.
“House” is so much the favorite of nerve injury patients that nothing else even comes close. Dr. Gregory House was shot in the leg and the nerve injury pain hurts him with every step. It’s peripheral nerve injury pain, but it’s close enough. Those of us with pain of central origin claim House as our patron Saint.
It takes almost no time to realize that unless you, yourself, personally, at this particular moment right now, have pain, that it doesn’t really matter, not really.
Pain is sort of unfashionable, stupid actually, and very weak. Even the invention of ether did not occur out of compassion but as the wish of a young dentist to build a practice. It was an era of breathing ether as a party game. Mesmer had made it fashionable to indulge oneself in fancy, and what could be more fantastic than “no pain at the dentist”. The first attempt was ether, which didn’t work so well, but then, remembering something from his chemistry instructor, Morton tried sulphurated ether. Bingo. It worked. Nothing to do but sit back and watch those spoiled rich people come in for their extractions. Except, somewhere along the way. Morton went soft and realized that what he had invented could revolutionize surgery.
What happened was a disaster, a furious uproar of “poppycock” from the John Hopkins Surgery department (except for ONE surgeon) who relied on four strong men, one for each extremity, as anethesia. When you saw them come for you in the room, get ready to scream like no one has screamed before. The operating suites at Hopkins had very high ceilings and were on the top floor. No one who cared was going to hear you. However, when the effectiveness of sulphurated ether was finally proven, the whole matter went over to the courts, as the possibility of real money loomed large.
In the courts, similar to those of our day, the chemistry professor impoverished the young dentist with legal fees over a “stolen idea for a patent”. This was before the dot.com lawyers, but they still had lots of paid indignant lawyers who wanted to “send a message” to any “would be patent stealers” in order to avoid the stifling of invention. In other words, they wanted Morton’s head and/or his invention, and being the good lawyers they were, they got both. The public was duly outraged at “the greatest benefactor of mankind” (as Morton was termed overseas) and the legal system did exactly as the lawyers urged, executed Morton financially. Morton died of starvation essentially, deprived of proper food or housing. The “PAIN” part of it (being easy to forget in others) was lost in the hubbub, except for the individual patients at Hopkins, who sudddenly quit kiiling themselves to avoid the pain of surgery. They were in their own private Idaho, which was looking much better, thank you. It was a shame about those four strong men who had to find other work.
There is hardly a patient with central pain who does not think the rest of the world is pretty much jerks. If they are not calling us liars, they force us to listen to how their pain, anything from stepping on a farm implement to unrequited love, whatever it is, was so terrible that they understand our pain perfectly and only wonder if we could ever grasp theirs. Hmmm. We were right. Other people really ARE jerks–huge, fricking, stupid, blind, uncaring jerks. These are our friends and neighbors, exposed for the colossal jerks they really are because they never ask about our pain, have no idea how terrible it is, and wouldn’t believe us if we told them.
Our central pain is only true commercially, which is to say at the doctor’s office. Nothing is more expensive to treat than pain. (unless it is the wringing out of all possible savings and insurance which hospitals perform at the end of terminal illnesses, as per those hospital appearing, pointless, resuscitations and R2D2 machines that go “beep”, which do get expensive). As for the central pain patient, the thirty thousand dollar pumps, the six thousand dollar Prialt, the two hundred dollar oxycontins, and the five thousand dollar MRI’s looking for nothing in particular and certainly nothing treatable, do add up. Regular MRI cannot see pain, functional MRI or PET might, if a pain specialist views it! The thing is, the medical history in central pain is always sufficient WITHOUT ANYTHING MORE THAN A GOOD HISTORY AND PHYSICAL, because it is so unique. Disordered superficial sensibility (von Frey hairs) with burning pain (you have to take the patients word on this one) after CNS injury equals central pain.
And so, knowing what a bunch of morons the public is at ignoring other people’s pain, at disbelieving pain, at not giving a tinker’s da__ about pain, at wasting good research money on unbelievable trivia (like movie stars or global warming), at making the pain sufferer an object of contempt, ridicule, and mostly indifference, we KNOW first hand how forgettable pain is, for others.
Now we would be ready, if asked, to send all these jerks around us straight to hell for their callous indifference, their smug superiority, their utter ignorance of pain chemistry, ion channels, etc. etc. except for one, very embarrassing thing. WE, yes WE forget about pain in others also. YOU, who thought pain was the only story, the only sound, the only reality, forgot that it was YOUR pain that was the only story, the only reality, the only thing worth caring about.
What proof do we have of this. Hating to really reveal how idiotic we are, in other words how like the rest of the human race we are, we feebly draw your attention to the March 6th production of House. Yes, we are talking about the television show. The fiendish producers and writers, KNOWING, that we ALL forget about pain in others and how BIG it is for THEM, blindsided us beyond belief this past week. To make a long story short, House, who has pain and knows a LOT about medical signs and symptoms, FAKES an incurable brain tumor, fooling the geniuses he works with, absorbing even their solemn expressions of grief, in order to get doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital to inject an opiate into the ventricles of his brain, which would give him some pain relief. No one in the entire TV viewing audience, including especially those with central pain who propped up from their beds of pain to watch their hero, remembered that the FUNDAMENTAL thing about House is that he is in PAIN. No one imagined he would be maniacal enough to get around his threat of arrest for taking Vicodin, by faking a terminal illness in order to get intraventricular opiates. (He is found out and never gets the pain medicine).
You see, that was HIS pain, not ours. We had watched House many times and his conniving ways to get Vicodin. We knew all about him, but we FORGOT! Cruelly, the writers took advantage of our status as jerks, and nailed us at our own game. Those of us who should have seen it coming a mile away were just as surprised to see House go to such lengths to get pain relief as anyone else. Having it forced home so indelibly made us cry at the semi-humorous House, for ourselves. If WE cannot even remember the core and nexus of House, who will ever remember our pain? No one.
It is clear. There is nothing to do with pain but to find a cure, because no one will gather together to help us. Making it even more ironic, when House is thought to be dying, Wilson reminds him that terminal cancer patients do pretty well as long as they have the support of family or friends, but alone they really suffer. Then in the piece de’ resistance, they remind us subtly that WE left House all alone, in his own private Idaho, where he could only do whatever he could think of, because pain is after all what drives and makes House.
So the next time those jerkosaurus rex neighbors sneer at your claim of central pain, ask yourself honestly, why did YOU forget House’s pain? Had you remembered how central it was to HIM, you would have seen right through the ruse. Had you remembered that what any pain patient wants more than anything else is to be rid of the pain, this episode of House could never have aired. Yes, you would do well to forgive those who forget your pain, who deny it, who denigrate it, who disparage it. The reason you should forgive is that pain is our own private Idaho, our own private hell, our own private us.
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The painonline editors have not personally seen the movie, “My Own Private Idaho”. We hear it is trashy. Good title, though.
P.S. Yes, we know global warming is not trivial–but to a patient in severe pain, EVERYTHING else is trivial. Get it? The point of House is that we imagine House’s pain only pertains to him, but the loss of his intelligence would impact LOTS of people. Ergo, his pain should be of concern to everyone.
