Administering Anaesthesia

Pain is a living, breathing, constantly adapting organism that lives within us. It has a life of its own – appearing when it chooses to and like a nasty disease it is very persistent and stays longer than needed to.

To deal with the undulating waves of pain accompanied with alternating episodes of nausea and dizziness, we use well tested treatments. From Paracetamol to perhaps something a little stronger such as Morphine – whatever remedy we chose to use only serves to numb the pain not deal with the underlying problem. Pain is a deeply rooted emotion with so many interconnections and uncertainties that understanding the cause becomes more difficult with each passing day.

Many a masochist out there in the big bad world will advocate the beauty and addictiveness of pain but for us normal and relatively sane individuals pain is a dreaded emotion. However, despite our fear of being hurt it is not surprising that we never think twice when dishing out the pain to someone else. Sometimes, our reasoning may seem sound. Rather cut your losses and hurt another person than set yourself up to eventually be hurt by them. Many may sit back and wonder, “Why is she so cynical?” but the crux of the matter is that we have all put another person through pain for various reasons apart from the one stated above.

 What do we do with the pain? If taking variable amounts of analgesics only serves to numb the pain and not solve the problem, what is there to do? Perhaps becoming a codeine addict seems apt. I mean, the habit isn’t exceptionally expensive and eventually you reach a point where you are never in the right state of mind to ever feel the pain. While that idea might seem appealing at first, I doubt many of us would like to walk around with dishevelled hair, smelly breath and in a general stupor in search of our next codeine fix. 

As previously mentioned, finding the source of the pain is exceptionally difficult based solely on the fact that we ignore the pain for so long that it eventually accumulates and one can no longer tell one reason from the next. Saying that you should face pain head on as it occurs is a very optimistic and unrealistic idea. No one likes to feel pain hence we will never accept that we are in pain. We will ignore the warning signs, pretend everything is okay until the searing pain within the chest radiates to your right shoulder and you begin to fear a myocardial infarction. At this point, post ECG, you will be told that what you were actually experiencing was an anxiety attack and not a heart attack. 

Realisation that you are actually drowning in a metaphorical ocean of emotion does nothing to still the fear that will overcome you once you are made to understand that what you are experiencing is a problem of the psyche and not something easily fixed through medication. To be quite honest, while I muse away about the concept of pain, I am unsure as to how to understand or deal with it. I really am at a loss. If anyone out there finds a cure for the underlying cause of emotional pain they should win a Nobel Peace Prize as the best way to advocate for peace is to overcome pain which usually precedes anger.

So while I may be at a loss as to the ultimate cure, I’m pretty sure that a simple remedy would be to acquire a willing friend, have them administer some anaesthetics to you and find a preferably qualified individual to remove all traces of perception from one’s cerebral cortex.