There is something very elusive about my relationship to pain. For a start the four-letter word itself seems woefully inadequate when confronted with the need to explain myself. If the Inuit have at least 50 words for snow surely we could better manage to differentiate between the qualities of the negative experience that is pain. Wikipedia tells me that, "Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage". This may be useful but it doesn't add to the lexicon at my disposal.
All of which is a preamble to admitting that I wasn't very good yesterday when the doctor in the Palliative Care Clinic at the QEH Cancer Centre went through his battery of questions designed to give him the clearest possible outline within the least amount of time. To be honest I was more than a little abstruse when it came to explaining the nature of my experience.
I had been given this appointment because a month or so earlier at the end-of-cycle consultation with my oncologist I had talked about the difficulties with pain management in my back and leg. By this time I already had a referral to the QEH pain clinic arranged by my orthopaedic consultant but it was for three months hence. 'Orthopaedic time' is elongated and interminable whereas 'cancer time' is, by comparison, smart and snappy. So my oncologist offered to speak to the Cancer Centre's pain management doctor. He was making no promises but within days an appointment had been made.
At least this was the first occasion when a doctor was interested in the whole experience - the problems resulting from my back as well as the cancer. Usually the doctors are wary of demarcation disputes and stick closely to their specialism. Encouraged, I made an unsuccessful attempt to talk about the pain resulting from different conditions 'overlapping' and 'interacting' but had to retreat under the baffled scrutiny to which he subjected me; and it didn't help that he had two registrars observing our exchange.
My concern is that I failed to give a good account of the situation I face; the different centres, shades, intensities and otherness of 'pain'.
Now at least you have some sense of how the doctor felt.
I have to accept that I have moved well beyond the point where pain is viewed as a symptom that assists diagnosis and treatment. The diagnoses, such as they are, particularly in relation to my back, have been made. The die is cast. Pain is now something to be treated as a discrete entity. It is separate from understanding and remedying the condition. It is now inevitable and long term.
The outcome was that I would supplement my existing cocktail of drugs by taking two paracetamol, four times a day for the next month - and monitor my capacity for physical exertion.
So, stuffed with paracetamol, I spent the afternoon sawing and chopping a modest amount of wood and then collecting some more from my store on the allotment. I took my time; approached each separate task in a measured way and asked for help when I had need of it. On this, the evening of the last drug day of my 5th cycle, I feel 'cream crackered'.
So, at least that is my baseline established. I'll see how it goes over the next month.
