The American writer Barry Hannah said that there’s a ghost in every story: a place, a memory, a feeling long forgotten. Experiences that never fully recede, people who leave an imprint. A permanent, if invisible residue. Memories sooted and flower-pressed; a part of us now, like a prosthetic formed of the past. For a long time, my grandmother was a ghost in her own story, living outside of herself as a result of fear and grief. Her mother was haunted too, and if there is an afterlife, or some residual space, a place where the ghosts of the men who came to them are, there is a chance that they are all together now. Alongside the women who preceded them, those armies of mothers and Magdalenes, women who wanted so much from the world; women who never asked for anything; women who walked those hills, calling into the wind; disappeared women, ground down by fate; but women, too, who left for something better, or those who found a sense of self – either peace or wildness within; women who found whatever it was they wanted; and all the women who walked into the fire of the future without a backward glance.
Where Does It Hurt?
Twenty stories based on the McGill pain index
The McGill Pain Index was developed in 1971 as a method for assessing pain according to a scale. Doctors devised 77 words for pain, which are divided into 20 groups, and patients select a single word from each group. They then choose three words from groups 1–10, two words from groups 11–15, one word from group 16, and one word from groups 17–20. The patient then has a selection of seven words that describes their sensation of pain. But words are often insufficient where pain is concerned. The patient is free to select multiple words, but pain cannot be reduced to one lexical bracket. It is difficult to explain a specific pain to someone who has never experienced it, or to someone whose life has been largely devoid of pain. Medical practitioners created the list and chose the descriptors. The words do not come from the person experiencing the pain; the words belong to the doctor, not the sufferer. This is an attempt at reclamation.
How many times have you been in pain? Did you have all the words you needed to tell the story of it?
What is the vocabulary of pain?
Flickering, Pulsing, Quivering, Throbbing, Beating, Pounding
Washerwoman’s Sprain
In his cot, my son, so longed for
Is a white seal cub,
Soft with no edges,
Eyes a religious blue,
Will they stay that shade?
His clam knuckle
Skin shell grooves
I pick him up, this almost person
Notice a new pain
In the wrist I don’t write with
The source is tendon
Not bone.
Soon I cannot lift him
Or coax the milk bubbles
From his belly
By flattening my hand
On his spine
De Quervain’s Disease
Says the specialist.
Or Washerwoman’s Sprain
(Not Washerman’s).
A reminder that
It is women
Who wash, carry, feed,
Women whose bodies
are the casualties of birth.
Jumping, Flashing, Shooting
Post-Surgery Drain Removal
A clear tube enters my body, a medical snake.
No venom or bite. The removal of old blood, bone crumbs, surgical detritus.
The drain-circle fills up, a white plastic sun.
I ask them to tell me when, as if starting a race.
Ready – Steady – Go!
To count me in, as though it is my turn to sing at the party.
Wine drunk, the hour late.
Count me in and I’ll open my throat.
1 – 2 – 3!
Tell me when you’re going to do it.
I will
Tell me when
OK
Tell me—
Pain forks in flesh, the tube yanked from deep inside. It emerges, a doppelganger birth with fake umbilical cord. The remaining hole, a red coin on skin.
Pricking, Boring, Drilling, Stabbing
Lumbar Puncture
Divining with needle, not rod
For cerebrospinal fluid
Drilling into vertebrae
Corkscrewed
Which grape am I?
Foetal-bent, focus on the highest
Point in the room, because pain
Is altitude; mountain sickness.
Newly mined, I can’t walk for two days
What food am I best served with?
Sharp, Cutting, Lacerating
Impacted Wisdom Tooth
I talk a lot
but never knew
my mouth was too small
until an oral surgeon says so.
These words make me giggle.
Childish, I know.
A troublesome tooth
breaks the skin
Sideways, not upwards.
A drunk leaning on a bar.
Growing into another molar.
The skin tears,
a spring plant
breaking through soil.
The surgeon declares me
The owner of
A small bite radius.
This will amuse my friends
Because word always gush from me.
A geyser of sentences
But now I have medical proof
Of a minute mouth.
Under anaesthetic,
Metal twists
in the tiny cave
of my mouth.
Molten gums.
Waking numb,
The brick removed from the wall of my teeth.
Over dinner, I tell friends the bite radius story.
We compare, and take photos.
My gay friend with the beautiful, full lips says a small mouth would be a problem for him.
We laugh.
Wine puckers in the empty bed
of that now-departed tooth.
Pinching, Pressing, Gnawing, Cramping, Crushing
Unexplained Headaches
They recur these infections,
returning like sailors with the dawn,
from things they wish they’d never seen.
There is a mouse in my skull,
Skittering within my cerebrum,
gnawing at cells.
Where balance and posture are controlled.
Is it head or brain or tooth or jaw?
I am a bad archaeologist,
Like the ones in Indiana Jones
digging in the wrong place.
Down that ear canal, pain spirals
Once, I had vertigo, and clung to a wall
As though on a sinking ship.
I swim between the hammer, anvil, stirrup
Ossicles oscillating.
In the MRI tunnel, music plays: The Carpenters’ ‘Superstar’.
I focus on Karen above the noise of the machine.
Which parts of my brain light up thinking of love? Or fear? Or Karen Carpenter?
This is not a coffin. This is not a coffin. This is not a coffin.
The mantra doesn’t drown out the pneumatic pulse. Are you there, Karen?
Tugging, Pulling, Wrenching
Smear Tests
If someone said they’d put the moon
Inside you, there is a chance
You would consent
To feel the white cold of it
Soles together in
Reclining Goddess Pose
Feeling less like a deity
Than a speculum’s captive
Hot, Burning, Scalding, Searing
Heartburn (in pregnancy)
It arrives like a stranger in town, an unfamiliar car cruising the street as mothers watch through curtains.
This experience is commonplace for many, but new to me.
On TV, there are ads for gloopy pink medicines. Actors clutch throats, frowning, performing discomfort.
My father’s stomach is
complex; in synchronicity with my life. When my mother was pregnant with my brother, his ulcer perforated. He worked near a hospital; the proximity meant he didn’t die.
But it left a phantom in his gut that has haunted his life.
Heat rises up. Alimentary canal as fire hazard, not phoenix.
Words challenge the inferno, but turn to ash in my
throat.
Wanted: one hydrant, hose me down.
Jaws chew chalky tablets and
It is quenched, as if
I’d fought it with a river.
When I am not pregnant I resolve to eat jalapeños straight from the jar.
Tingling, Itchy, Smarting, Stinging
Eye Injury (at a music festival)
People on every inch of grass
Music bleeds from one striped marquee to another
We dance like pagans, into the night, in the rural pitch dark,
The campsite generators hum as we pick our way
through tents strewn like battlefield bodies.
Then one eye doesn’t open.
Spilling fake tears.
A golf cart arrives, a makeshift ambulance,
Driving comically up grass aisles,
Bouncing over beer cans and
the outline of fairy forts
I make a pirate patch
With the back of my hand.
In a medical tent, a doctor – too handsome – tilts my head gently. At each forty-five-degree angle, he asks personal questions.
Are you here with a partner?
My husband.
Has anyone hurt you?
No!
He makes me wonder if this is common. If guys hit their girlfriends under coloured flags, after marrying in an inflatable church. Amid all that life, is there still a knuckle to the face?
He says, a foreign body.
I think, too much dancing, no sleep.
Dull, Sore, Hurting, Aching, Heavy
Not Breast-Feeding
Heparin
Cabbage leaves
The sadness
The judgement
Tender, Taut (tight), Rasping, Splitting
Scars
Sometimes they have teeth,
a mouth sewn up with metal
As though protesting.
Skin clamped,
To induce healing.
Or they are paper,
For shallow wounds.
Medical thread, thick as eyebrow hair –
Platelets march over the hill to the battle trenches of the body,
An army of coagulation captains.
Working quickly, until softness becomes a seam,
a boundary wall on the body.
It itches, yeah, like you wouldn’t believe.
You watch its progress, its possibility.
Don’t cough, it’ll split,
It pulls itself together,
A gathered bow, pursed lips.
A new pin dropped on your map.
Tiring, Exhausting
Pregnancy
Hunger is a steam train,
I shovel food
To drive nausea away.
Throat burns, hotter than coals.
Past stations named for weeks and trimesters
This baby and I,
Two tracks running into the night.
Sickening, Suffocating
Lung Clot
No breath is deep enough
to fill the well of my lungs.
Inhale fully, as if smelling
Petrichor, bergamot, a baby’s skin.
On the X-ray, the doctor points at the mass
Circling it with a pen.
Is that from years of social smoking?
No – that’s your clot.
Breathe as if air is running out,
in a container or a coffin.
Each intake is a knife in the chest
Rationed until they are less frequent,
shallow and incomplete.
Lungs collapse, fungal pneumonia
To stop pain, and reinflate,
A morphine pump feeds into your stomach
And for a day it’s magic and lightning
My father says I solved
The meaning of life
What did I say? You bend your ear.
Christ! I couldn’t follow you, love.
You:
– think people are there who aren’t.
– cry apocalyptically.
– have nightmares full of blood and animals.
– scoop up handfuls of bathwater and throw them at your husband, as if putting out a fire.
But it works, this poison.
Lungs recover, you suck in air,
deep as a joint.
Fearful, Frightful, Terrifying
A Fall
In front of an audience, I interview a feminist academic. She is smart and funny. We unite in our horror of patriarchy, exchange stories of harassment the time we shaved our heads.
Men always make assumptions about sexuality, availability and attitude based on a woman’s hair, she says.
Afterwards, under the warm June sky, I miss my footing on a slanted street. Turn and turn, a dervish girl, fear rising up before I hit the ground.
Slap of concrete. Hip takes the brunt, except it’s not bone, but ceramic and titanium. The stars scold my clumsiness.
In the ambulance, I do that thing that women do – even in fear – I apologise. For taking up their time, this stretcher, one side of this vehicle with tubes and
masks.
I know many kinds of soreness, but not this.
In the X-ray department, staff surround me.
On my count, lift! and from head to toe, my body detonates.
A kind of hurt that is atomic, radiating mushroom clouds.
Fear of what I’ve done.
The ceramic ball of your hip replacement may have exploded.
I did this to myself.
A physiotherapist identifies the problem: severe bone bruising.
As painful as a break, regularly seen in skiing accidents (I have never been skiing). In the heat of the ward, I long for snow, a blizzard, an avalanche.
You dodged a bullet, says my orthopaedic surgeon a week later.
Punishing, Gruelling, Cruel, Vicious, Killing
Unlistened to Pain
I have been condescended to by enough consultants to know when I’m not believed. When I try to use words like the ones on this list, to articulate and communicate physical distress, sometimes I cannot find the word, or know there may not be one. Patients fight for their health to be acknowledged, to be treated, for someone to say:
I know what this is, and I will help you.
Pain is about answering a question the body asks. It is shared to find a solution, but is often met with doubt.
Is it really that bad?
Illness of any kind requires a private designation. It has become acceptable that many conditions are played out in waiting rooms, wards and surgeries. Rendered public, making the experience of illness political – to borrow Hannah Arendt’s assertion that any act undertaken in public is a political one. Women learn early that absorbing pain is a means of martyrdom inching us closer to the bodies of saints, as if discomfort equates to religious ecstasy. That there is meaning in suffering, except that there is not.
Wretched, Blinding
ATRA Side Effects
Capsules of red and yellow
A kind of semaphore
Pool table balls
Dose: nine a day
(four in the morning,
five in the evening)
for fifteen days.
A split ritual:
is the morning yellow
and the evening red?
ATRA. All-Trans Retinoic Acid
Contains arsenic, but
A good kind of toxic.
Not botulinum, polonium.
Side effects:
Headaches worse than hangovers.
&nbs
p; Skin dry, desiccated.
Blurred vision, eyes on strike.
Shapes on my retina,
A rotating swastika.
A fertility symbol
Until Nazis stole it.
I find other words:
Tetraskelion.
Fylfot.
Gammadion Cross.
Annoying, Troublesome, Miserable, Intense, Unbearable
Knocked Down by a Car (Hip)
Against a tall concrete wall, a line of children’s arms form a bridge of flesh. I dip under, run the length of them, and they are free.
This time, I am the hero of the game, emerging from beneath the last arm. Triumphant, ready for a victory strut, darting between two parked cars out onto the road.
A maroon mirage, and the bumper hits.
Throws me to the ground.
My softness incongruous
against the road.
Get up, get up
The driver’s frightened face is freeze-framed panic.
Someone scoops me up, runs to my parents’
Children streak behind, Pied Piper-esque,
I’m carried from kitchen to hall.
Trying to locate my mother’s shouts
We miss each other in every room.
The local doctor is terse.
Nothing broken, you’re fine.
This is where it starts.
The first medical diss and
Dismissal.
It hurts for days, deep down,
But no permanent cuts or scars.
A get-well gift of a jungle jigsaw.
I work on its edges, watch bruises appear
like lily-pads on skin.
For decades doctors try to solve the riddle of my bones and ask:
Did you ever fall, or have an accident?
I nod, but it’s not the answer to their question.
Spreading, Radiating, Penetrating, Piercing
Breast Cysts
Of all the words for pain, here are the truest:
Constellations Page 12