As I sat in the dentist chair last week, enduring some slow drilling as he removed an old filling in a broken tooth, I was experiencing double pain - the economic one (another god-damn crown) and the physical one.
With little else to do, I started to think about the last time I'd experienced that sort of physical pain/discomfort and it seemed that the logical time was during my treatments in mid 2010. That in itself seems so long ago now, but while pondering the pain history, it occurred to me that I couldn't actually remember any real pain any more. So, is time really a great healer, or does time merely end up superceding or suppressing the painful memory, in some kind of defence mechanism?
Sure, a week down the track, and with some effort, I can now remember some moments of pain, but given the total period of my treatments, they are relatively few and far between, so why is that? Logic says that the experts got the medication regime spot on pretty quickly and morphine will without doubt continue to be my favourite pain relief for many years to come (although, I'd rather not have to undergo any sort of situation that required it thank you very much), but is it that simple. Sure, the drugs are there to manage the pain, but isn't that just the point - without any pain, how do you know it's working?
From conversations I've had with people who visited me at hospital, it would appear I'd quite happily phase in and out, talking to them one minute and waking up some time later to resume conversation. I was obviously in a very happy drug-induced space, so it's no wonder I struggle to remember the pain. The first week of treatment is memorable for the issues with "accepting" Jake, but the only real pain was the needles & cannulas that started to become part of an ongoing cycle, so after a while you just accepted them (as much as it is possible to do so) and as they became routine, so did the acceptance of the discomfort they brought with them.
When the effects of the chemo started kicking in, and as the proper medication regime fired up, there was undoubtedly real pain to deal with (check this posting out to see how things were going early on in the process), but I struggle to remember now how it really felt then - thankfully the blog postings help there.
As I came out the other end of the treatments, and they started to wean me off the morphine, they were looking to ensure that with each reduction I wasn't requiring top-ups in the form of the morphine elixir to keep the pain away, so even at this late stage, there was expectation of some pain. By the time I was totally morphine-free, things had obviously run their course and I had no need for any drugs whatsoever (ignoring the temporary distraction of the subsequent gastric bug and it's treatment).
Back to the original question then - is the passage of time really a healer, or just a mechanism to help us forget? A part of me doesn't really care - I'm just thankful to still be hear to ponder this issue. Another part of me thinks the latter is probably closer to the mark.
I suppose the reality is we need to accept the body (in its entirety including the mind) is a truly marvellous machine. It has the ability to self-heal (in a large number of circumstances), accept all sorts of abuse and make adjustments to keep on working, manages to let us remember things - both good and bad - at will, gives us the ability to learn & feel new things, yet it doesn't let us forget the past. It's almost like there is an inbuilt mechanism that periodically forces us to revisit past events, just to remind us not to take things for granted.
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