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.