On living with pain

PERSONAL COLUMN KENNETH ALLSOP

A friend in need is a friend indeed. The good Samaritan. It takes all sorts to make a world.

Nobody wants you when you're down and out. Fair-weather friends. . . . Bless me, how the rusty adages clatter down the slot when you're laid low, shunted off the main line into hospital.

And the old worn coinage proves to be sterling silver. Dr Johnson's observation that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully, applies (perhaps a little less urgently) to the sick bed: there's no place like it for rediscovering the essential credibility of clich6s, such as the one about finding out who your true friends are when tribulation comes.

About six-months ago I was informed that I was quite seriously ill, that within me was a rotting organ. While it was being bombarded by wonder drugs and miracle drugs, one's mind rummaged through these dusty platitudes and saw them to be window-tested and true. It is doubtless simplistic to divide the human race into those who care and those who don't, yet it was irresistibly noticeable who, among one's intimates and acquaintances, proffered help, concern, a bundle of books, a note of commiseration, a word of support, and which ones didn't. It was a curious mixture. Get-well cards, letters and telephone calls came from total strangers or barest acquaintances, as well as from dear ones, and there were some quite

• marginal friends who bothered to interrupt their busy lives to strike out into the unknown McMurdo Sound of North London where I was incarcerated and pay personal visits, thus main- taining one's wavering hope that a niche was being kept for one in the human race.

But others, whom in theory one regarded as trusty chums, remained silent and absent. One speculated a little upon this. Of course we are all, individually, self-absorbed and inward- looking : our most precious possession is ourself, the hub of the universe. Also there are those to whom illness in others is discom- forting and unnerving, and who must turn their heads away to divert themselves with happier sights. And there are also those toughies—quite often the most amusing bar and luncheon com- panions—who scorn compassion : if you stumble, then pick yourself up, mate, because my hands are too full (of gins-and-tonic, expres- sive gestures to illustrate my anecdotes and editors' commissions) to be spared. In most cases—including my upright, pre-pesthouse self—when the ritualistic 'How are you?' greet- ing is put, a bright reply is confidently expected. It is part of the social machinery of mutual comfort. If a coming confession of woe is even sniffed there is an instant glazing over, part boredom, part irritation, part disquiet. Well, don't bug me, is the thought, I've got my prob- lems.

There was ample time, however, for other reflections during those days of being tapestried with needles and pumped full like a Michelin Man with antibiotics. There were the crude emotions that swilled in at high tide during the mournful hours of being sorry for myself. Hadn't one bloody well paid one's dues already, one demanded resentfully of the rain-smeared window? Agnosticism didn't prevent indignant rancour that one had been sorted out again by some malignant cosmic bully-boy. Wasn't there a rationing system for doling out retribution and suffering? Had the computer got jammed on the Allsop programme? How about moving the finger on to some of the bastards of the world, indestructible with rude health and virility?

The wallowing in such commonplace and paltry passions was left behind as one gradually wobbled into motion again on the reserve tank of stoicism. Yet there remained the recognition that pain is an oddly undiscussed subject, sel- dom gone into in print. The explanation, pre- sumably, is that those who've never experienced it can't write about it (another of Dr Johnson's remarks was that 'Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt') and those who have experienced it are reticent.

This is because, thankfully, whereas a period of pain can be remembered, the actual sensa- tion cannot be. Also, while illness and medical treatment in general are popular subjects (for we all enjoy a bit of morbid narcissism) an instinctive shying away from the reminiscences of heroic cripples and people who have con- quered cancer is widespread. This has been my own reaction, as a book critic, to autobio- graphies of polio victims who have doggedly taught themselves to type with their teeth, or legless air aces who have gone back into the battle : a mixture of queasiness and embarrass- ment, perhaps containing, too, a tinge of fear at such naked exposure of the disasters to which all our mortal bodies are vulnerable. Addition- ally one dreads mawkishness, self-pity and self- aggrandisement, in the revelations of those who cheerily cope with monstrous disabilities.

All the same, pain is a ubiquitous reality few of us finally escape, in small or major doses,

and some personal recollections—neither

mawkish not braggy, I hope—may not be out of place. I have always seen Myself as a fit

and energetic persbn, quite tough and strong, capable of enjoying and surviving both the killing rigours of Fleet Street pubs and the axe-swinging and spade-bashing of country weekends. Yet recently it was reluctantly borne upon me that, really, I have never (in the phrase Which has always made me cringe with nose- wrinkling distaste when hearing it from others, usually pasty-faced invalids) 'enjoyed good health' during all my adult life.

Since I was twenty-three, on morphia and the danger list with a smashed and gangrenous knee, I don't think there has been a waking

hour when I have not consciously been in dis- comfort at best or agony at worst. This derives

from wearing an artificial leg. First there were two years of futile attempts, including ten operations, to get the knee joint repaired, fol- lowed by amputation; after which came nine months on crutches while a harassed staff in the huddle of sheds that was then Roehampton struggled to fit out the flood of limbless ex- servicemen. Then I received my grotesquely

ill-matched tin leg. For years I hobbled and clanked about on this, while the socket, loose as a curtain ring, produced a ridge of abscessed callouses. The point came when it was an act Of will to force myself to get up in the morning and renew the torment that every step and movement brought. One inwardly sweated and outwardly smiled—the corny requirement of putting as good a face as possible on it while performing one's active journalistic life. Surgery eventually excised the abscesses and refitting with a modified suction socket brought some relief, though a tin leg cannot ardently be recommended as a satisfactory substitute for the original. No matter how snug and streamlined it is, abrasions, bruisings, achings and nippings continue, and one seldom dismantles oneself for bed without feeling to have been stretched on the rack for the past sixteen hours.

Then there are the nerve pains. This is the famous 'invisible limb' phenomenon, the vibra- tions running the length of where the leg was.

This can be no more. disturbing than mild tremors extending like inflamed antennae from the end of the stump. Or it can flare into attacks of horrible violence, when electric shocks stab through the stump as if live high- voltage wires are being jabbed at the tip in some esoteric Bond-ish torture, neuralgic spasms that convulse the body and stretch one's sanity like a fraying rubber band.

Still, one adapts to such imposed conditions and improvises an ability to ignore or accom- modate them, while pursuing a normal wage- earning course. Psychologically, over-compen- sation may enter here. Possibly to offset both the physical limitations and the personal know- ledge of how much effort and ingenuity are needed to negotiate such routine tasks as climb- ing stairs, enduring long walks and standing half-drunk at cocktail parties, one drives one- self so much harder, and makes unwise and

unreasonable demands upon the remaining portion of one's body—with other conse- quences and pain of a different kind, in. a different place : at least life brings variety.

Of course, it would be inane to suppose that life can be lived without distress or can ever —should ever—be protectively encased, viewed inertly through the hygienic opacity of a poly- thene bag. I take Hemingway's view that cour- age is grace under stress and that that is an attribute worth trying to acquire. Yet I re- member bitterly hating the nun, upon whose

hospital I had been unloaded by the RAF, lec- turing me with chill sanctimoniousness—when I was biting the blanket and imploring her for a shot of something obliterating—that our lot on earth was to suffer. I believe in alleviation to the maximum, yet see that 'pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.' That, though, means intermissions must be afforded. I am not persuaded of the spiritual benefits of pain, the theory that the soul is thus refined and irradiated. Incessant, grinding pain interferes with the preferable condition, that of the mediaeval aspiration to viral, the shaping Of an educated mind that can reason with ele- gance, order and profundity. Arthritis or toothache or a kidney stone can sabotage such serenity from the start. But it is important, I think, to emulate to the end Nancy Cunard's disdain for weakness and the crumbling of the self, to remember her insisting to John Banting, when her matchstick frame was finally splinter- ing: 'One's body should not he felt.'