I recently had some minor surgery on my shin that turned out to be more painful than anticipated; for two days I seriously thought I would become a Vicodin junkie. All those twinges shooting across my shin like darts; the sensation of skin tugging and pulling in places where it ought not to be. Maybe I’m a wimp, with a low pain threshold; maybe because it was worse than I thought it would be I didn’t know how to deal with the unexpected incapacitation, immobility, disfigurement. I lay doped up in bed and read Chekhov and thought about the pain he must have witnessed on a regular basis in his rounds as a country doctor—although it is mainly the psychological pain which is chronicled in his work; a world without Vicodin or anaesthesia, only vodka to numb the acute awareness pain brings of our mortal, animal humanity.

My cat generally delights in jumping on me at two in the morning, and no part of my supine anatomy is safe from the rough landing of his little paws. Now he howls outside the closed door, banned and miserable; I cringe at the idea of the contact between those paws and my shin.

These are trifles, to be sure. Most pain is silent, routine, discreet, but still relatively, or absolutely, terrible for the one suffering. Severe, acute pain—in war, in prisons, in hospitals—is unimaginable to most of us; we put our faith in the Red Cross, in Doctors without Borders, in anesthesiologists, to keep us sheltered from the reality of it. Sometimes I think of Princess Diana’s final moments, and what she is supposed to have murmured, feebly waving her hand. Like a pure vision of pain.

I recently read an article about a young boy in Pakistan who was able to drive a knife blade through his arm, or walk on hot coals, and he felt nothing. He died at the age of 14 from jumping from a roof during a game. Clearly his short life had been free of physical pain and he did not know the boundaries between safe and mortal; researchers subsequently turned to his family and found they all carried the same mutant gene which gave them a life free of the sensation of pain. Touch, heat, cold and other forms of sensitivity were intact, but they were missing the primal alarm bell to protect them from injury: several members of the family had injured themselves quite severely. On the basis of research into this mutant gene, scientists hope to find new ways to manage pain; but this cautionary tale reminds us that pain saves lives, too, even as it warns us sharply that we have strayed too close to the edge.

Throughout history pain has had currency, inflicted in exchange for confessions or submission, exploited for material or political gain by torturers and purveyors of narcotics and pharmaceuticals alike. In everyday life, some of us suffer in silence, like cats hiding under a bed, licking their wounds; others proclaim the level of pain like a medal won in battle, use it to gain pity or admiration. How stoic; how self-indulgent. We try to teach small children who fall down and scrape their knees that that is a non-negotiable pain, something they must get used to if they want to grow up and join the adult world. It’s a mommy joke: fall down go boom. Dentists get a bad rap; all of us, of a certain generation at any rate, carry the image of a malevolent Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man torturing Dustin Hoffman, and the echo of his chilling words, Is it safe? My daughter crouched in terror in a corner the first time I took her to the school dentist. And yet my own dentist has never made me suffer: the streetcar ride to his office is generally more unpleasant than the time in his chair. He is the soul of gentleness. Perhaps my teeth and gums are less sensitive than my shins, after a lifetime of being mined like the Sierra Mother Lode.

Memory of a young intern in a Swiss hospital who removed a growth on my finger many years ago and then “cleaned” the wound, rather too enthusiastically: how I lay in bed all afternoon crying, with nothing more than aspirin for the pain, surely the most acute I’ve ever known. And childbirth? It’s different. As my mother wisely pointed out, you are programmed to forget the pain. It’s a happy pain, in a way; only a selfish woman, runs the subtext, would ever refrain from having a child because she is afraid of pain. It is a pain you forget, or boast about with a smile, when you’ve opted not to have an epidural.

The other night, my leg propped up in relative comfort (the sudden absence of pain is almost sensual, but that’s a topic for an entire post…) on the sofa, I watched the Golden Globe awards: happy, successful celebrities in abundance, many of whom will have mimed atrocious pain (or the infliction thereof) in the course of their careers. Of course I wasn’t looking at them and remembering the staged scenes from any particularly violent or traumatic film (although Dustin Hoffman was present), but when Governor Schwarzenegger limped on stage between a pair of crutches, wincing I think not from the spotlight but from a certain discomfort (or is it his usual grimace?), I felt a slight twinge of empathy, knowing that his broken leg must surely be as painful or more than my eight stitches. He opened the envelope and read out the winner of the best film award, to Babel, which I have not seen but which, I have heard, has pain and death in starring roles.

Every day my scar heals, the throbbing subsides, the inflamed tissues cool and relax. My cat will soon be re-admitted to my chambers. This small parentheses in my regular pain-free life has served as a reminder of how easily we take our comfort—and our vulnerability—for granted. I got off easy, really, and even got to read Chekhov, without vodka.

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