Pain

My first memory is of climbing over a barbed-wire fence when I was five or six years old. My hand slipped and a barb tore a one inch gorge into the middle of my palm. In the hospital my mother held my good hand and the doctor stitched the bad one up, while I recited Jack and the Beanstalk punctuated by the odd 'ouch'.

Many years later I had a wisdom tooth with a twisted root extracted under anaesthetic. I had a relatively pain free twenty-four hours but something went wrong and I developed a painful complication called dry socket. I spent a week in agony, unable to open my mouth.

I know that both these situations were extremely painful because of my reactions and that people tell me so, but I can't actually remember what the pain felt and behaved like. When I hurt my hand shock came down like a transparent curtain, turning me into a mere bystander to the frenzied blur to the hospital.

Similarly I have now blocked out the feeling of nerve exposed to air, not through shock but through self-preservation. I remember crying in helplessness and frustration, my whimpers and groans muffled through gritted teeth, calling my boyfriend at work just to hear his voice, the receptionist telling me to go back to the surgeon because my pain was not normal.

Now my mouth is filled with Novocaine and again I can only describe my bloated useless tongue, the slurred speech and the distant tingling in my lips – but the feeling itself eludes me once more, the complete opposite of pain, the absence thereof. It is my writing's achilles heel.