Pubdate: Tue, 07 May 2002 Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) Copyright: 2002 Richmond Newspapers Inc Contact: http://www.timesdispatch.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/365 Author: A. Barton Hinkle WRITTEN IN A HAZE: AN ACCOUNTING OF LESSONS LEARNED IN THE HOUSE OF PAIN In contravention of the general rule in these quarters to abjure the navel-gazing "I," this is a pretty personal column - though far from exclusively so. Today's topic is one that has consumed your servant's attention for going on a month now: pain. Not headache pain, not sprained-ankle pain, but pain on a different plane: shaking, white-knuckle pain, writhe-on-the-floor pain, scream-into-a-towel pain. Last week Bill Buckley wrote about quantifying the unquantifiable, such as pleasure. The stimulus that produces a five on one person's one-to-10 scale might bring someone else a three, a third person a seven. But there is no way to place the scales side by side to see where they meet. Everyone's basis of comparison is wholly interior. Mine is - was - a broken leg. A few years ago a tae kwon do sparring mishap caused a shinbone to snap. Months in a cast followed, but the worst moments occurred in the first few days. After that caution kept pain at bay - caution, and ibuprofen. Until recently the leg had set the standard. For the past few weeks, though, caution and ibuprofen have had as much success against pain as sunscreen would have against Napalm. (The cause: a combination of factors stemming from what started out as a minor complaint.) Convalescence makes work hard but leaves time to reflect on things, such as . . . . . . . A college chum now in medicine has taken an interest in suffering. Go into any gym and you will see plenty of people in pain - but they are not suffering. Their pain is self-inflicted. They control its degree and duration. Suffering comes from pain that might be no greater, but that the individual cannot foresee, cannot control, and cannot predict an end to. Is it worse to endure a level-four headache that won't go away or a level-eight exercise burn that will end the moment you choose to end it? I'd call the low-grade headache worse. . . . Speaking of the medical profession, let us now say a word in favor of doctors. If there is justice in the world, they should be the happiest people on Earth. It is gratifying to open a door for someone laden with parcels or lend a hand to a friend moving into a new house. Doctors have immense professional frustrations these days, but one hopes they at least occasionally gain boundless gratification from seeing someone in distress and lifting that burden. They certainly merit boundless gratitude. . . . There are those who, in their zeal to prosecute the war on drugs, oppose not only allowing the medical use of marijuana by, for example, terminal cancer patients, but who also oppose even merely studying the concept. Such a position is not only cruel, it is stupid. Patients using marijuana to relieve suffering - under strictly regulated arrangements overseen by federal authorities who provide the weed from a tightly controlled cache - pose no threat to law and order. They do not fund terrorism, as government ads say users of illegal narcotics do. They will not graduate to more powerful stuff or start cruising the seedy side of town hoping to score a vial of crack. The government allows other much more powerful drugs to be used under medical supervision; it should do the same for pot. . . . Say what you will about John McCain's positions on certain issues, his declining early release from his captors when he was a POW in Vietnam displayed a breathtaking amount of courage. A while back McCain took some incoming fire for using a racial slur when referring to his captors. Well, sorry. Such dehumanizing words are not nice, and should be used just about never. But McCain earned the right to use them through years of torture that produced permanent injury. More to the point, his captors earned the epithets through their savagery. How anyone could inflict such agony on someone surpasses comprehension, and there is a certain despair in the agnostic doubt as to whether there is a place in Heaven for him - or one in Hell for them. . . . A while ago a conversation with a friend about science and religion brought up the old Problem of Evil. If there is a benevolent God, why does He allow suffering? The answer - aside from the fact that free will makes evil possible - might be that suffering acts as a refiner's fire to purify the soul. Whether it does that, it certainly enhances empathy, and it intensifies appreciation of friends and family, whose helpfulness and kindness seemingly know no limit. In that regard let us end with a kind of public-service announcement: Do not hesitate to help those beset by illness or injury, for kindness follows Buckley's Law of Contrasting Scales. A quick errand is but a trifle to the person doing it; to the person for whom it is done, the same act is a grand gesture. Even a phone call seems like grounds for canonization - and those on the receiving end, when not fighting back tears of pain, will be fighting back tears of gratitude. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth