In Terms of Pain

There’s a weird thing about relativity that goes on after watching a loved one suffer and then die from cancer: pretty much no ailment really seems all that bad.

When I start to think that I don’t feel well, my thoughts immediately go to the look on my dad’s face when he was so sick, the confusion in his eyes when he asked over and over “Why am I not getting better?” and the desperation in his voice when we brought him home from the hospital for the last time and he asked me, “Are you sure we have enough medicine?”  I feel certain that the emotional pain he was in and the stress he felt for so many reasons were worse than the physical pain towards the end; all of it was nothing short of torturous.

So these days when I think about something like pneumonia, I think: not that bad.  A bout of the flu?  You’ll get over it.  A migraine?  Take some medicine and quit your whining.  Throw your back out?  Give it a couple of days and it’ll be like it never happened.  Common cold?  Jesus, get ahold of yourself you freaking wimp.  These are not things I say to other people (not out loud, at least), but I definitely say them to myself, just one more way that my perspective has changed.

I remember both times my dad was in the hospital and the staff seemed to be constantly asking him to rate his pain. Every time he was asked, he was shown a little visual guide; it seemed to annoy him much more than it helped him.  He always did what I came to think of as "white coating" his response (sugar-coating for the white coats); the number that he gave and that was recorded in his medical chart was always lower than it actually seemed to be to those of us who spent a lot of time with him.  Many times Dad was very obviously in pain, grimacing and asking for a cold cloth to be placed on his head, and then when a health care worker walked into the room his demeanor shifted:  "How's it going, Doc?" or "I hope your shift ends soon - it seems like you've been here for days and I know you're tired!" he would say. Truth be told, sometimes it made me angry, not necessarily at him or at the staff member but just in general at the fact that he felt like he needed to pretend to feel better than he was actually feeling.

Several times I thought about following the nurse or whoever had asked him to rate his pain out into the hallway to ask them to put a footnote explanation alongside the number Dad had given, but for some reason I never actually did it.  What they didn't realize besides the fact that Dad tended to "round down" was that his natural pain tolerance was about 100 times that of most other people, the result of decades of enduring grueling athletic workouts.

I know it’s not a contest, and I know that pain is pain and sometimes it just helps to let out a moan or a cuss word in complaint of the discomfort that’s ailing a person.  But, like pretty much everything else in life, pain is linked to perspective.  I WISH I STILL THOUGHT A HANGNAIL or even a raging case of poison ivy was worthy of whining.

Off-Label Uses

Sometimes people use a medication or a health care product to help with things besides the ailment or condition that the product was intended to address.  This off-label use is often done out of necessity, when things recommended by health care professionals or others have not solved the problem.  It's more of a last resort, a whatever-it-takes type of effort, or sometimes just a belief in a wives' tale or a carrying on of tradition than a science project.

Vicks VapoRub ointment is one product that has been said to work for treating things other than what its label says it treats; a couple of its off-label uses are treating toenail fungus and repelling mosquitoes. 

Proctor & Gamble, the company that makes Vicks, has a disclaimer on their website that says their product "can be used for the treatment of cough associated with the common cold" but that they "haven't tested, nor has the FDA approved, Vicks VapoRub as a toenail fungus treatment" and, therefore, they say, it is not recommend for the treatment of toenail fungus.  I think there are lots of people, though, who swear that Vicks alleviates them of that condition.  Not having fungus-y toenails (yay for me!), I haven't ever tried using it for that, but I have tried it a couple of times for keeping mosquitoes away when I've run out of Off! and it seemed to work just fine for that.

One of my sisters has yet another off-label use for Vicks Vaporub: she puts a little bit of it under each of her eyes whenever she has trouble sleeping.  She's done that since she was a teenager; she says the fumes it gives off sting her eyes, which forces her to keep her eyes closed, which eventually causes her to get bored enough to go to sleep.  I don't see any kind of warning about that on the Vicks website, so I guess it's an ok thing to do, and, as anyone who has ever suffered (and I do mean suffered) from insomnia can attest, at a certain point in a sleepless night, it's anything goes/whatever works to provide a little shut-eye before the sun comes up.

When I was running competitively a lot in high school, I sometimes tried to emulate some of the rituals that my dad had surrounding his running routine. One thing he did that I started imitating then was taking a couple of swigs out of the bottle of Mylanta that we kept on the door of the fridge as soon as I came in from a strenuous run.  I didn't know why he did it; I just did it because he did.  Many years later, I happened to think about how we used to do that, and I asked him why he did it back then.  "When you run hard, most of your blood goes to your arms and legs instead of to organs like your stomach, and so a hard run can make you feel sick to your stomach, and Mylanta helps with that," he told me.  I kind of half-laughed and asked him he'd ever tried any other remedies for the same problem, and he said, "Well, I guess I've tried beer, but I'm not sure if that helped my stomach or if it just tasted so good after a hard run that I didn't care if my stomach hurt."

I don't think the company that makes Mylanta has looked into billing it as a special after-workout remedy for runners, but maybe they should.  I know of another off-label use for it that they could advertise, too: when my oldest child was a baby, I worked in a nursing home, and one of the residents there told me that I should try using a liquid antacid like Mylanta to treat diaper rash.  "Just put some on a cotton ball and dab it on the rash," she told me.  Later, when I tried it, I found out that it worked better than any diaper-rash ointment I'd tried.  I ended up telling a friend of mine who was also a new parent about it; luckily, she asked me for clarification of how it should be used before she tried it because she later told me that she first thought I'd meant that an oral dose of it should be given to the baby. 

One thing that has surprised me about the process of grief has been the way the emotional pain often flows over into physical pain, and one way that that has occurred for me has been in the form of back pain.  Before I'd really realized what was causing the pain that plagued me night and day, I had been attributing the pain to poor posture or just to having slept  wrong, and I tried the usual treatments - ice, heat, stretching, pills, chiropractic.  Nothing worked, at least not for very long.  Finally, after reading about the grief process, I came to the conclusion that my sorrow and the other emotions tied up with the whole process had sort of settled into the joints and the muscles affecting my back, and I told myself that, like a lot of the intense emotional pain I was feeling at the time, I just had to ride it out until it got better on its own in time. In the meantime, though, especially at night, I ended up calling on my old running training buddy, Icy Hot.  The weird first cold-then hot numbing action it has helped me to relax; some nights it was the only thing that allowed me to go to sleep, essentially making it yet another product with an off-label use, this time to curb the often almost-debilitating pain of raw grief.