n.b. if you haven’t noticed, I have been off my game with writing about data and work related topics. I expect that data and work related topics will be back on the menu sometime in October or November. I’m getting married in September and have been dealing with fairly significant health issues in addition to last minute wedding planning items and a demanding but fun job, so you can imagine I don’t really want to write about work related stuff when I’m off the clock right now. If you followed me for the data stuff, stick around, it’s not gone forever. I’m just busy out of my mind right now and I don’t have the extra mental energy to fully flesh out some of the data-related post ideas I have banging around in my head.
You might find you like some of my non-data related writing! I promise I put on a reasonably good written show. This one’s kinda intense though and is about pain so read with caution.
I am afraid of pain. I imagine most of us are.
Pain, of course, serves an important purpose in our existence. Broadly, pain is a communication tool our bodies use when something isn’t right. A headache after drinking 3 cups of coffee in a row and no water is your body telling you it’s time to hydrate. Aching feet after 20,000 steps and 20 slides at a water park is your body telling you it’s fatigued and you need to rest. A sore lower back after a long day at work is your body telling you it needs a walk, stretch, and perhaps some form of core exercise to reduce strain. A sore throat and a headache after being outside in terrible air quality during an especially bad fire season in Colorado is your body telling you it needs clean air to breathe, not smoke.
I don’t fear everyday pains. I have grown to respect my body enough to listen to her when she’s telling me what she needs. I have developed routines over the years to keep her happy and functioning as best as she can be. I drink lots of water, eat mostly balanced meals, limit my alcohol consumption, and am a religious exerciser and stretcher. I view these habits as a kindness to my body. She’s a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of evolutionary pressures and leftover structures and genetic scrapbooks that mother nature was too sentimental to get rid of.
There is no such thing as a peak of evolution, by the way. There are only branches on the tree of life, and each branch is riddled with leftovers from its history and cobbled-together structures where it made the best of what it had1.
Everyday pains are always present and are manageable. I fear unavoidable, terrible pain.
I knew boxing was going to be a risky sport when I got into it. I figured the most likely injuries I would sustain would be a broken nose, or perhaps a broken rib. I boxed for the 3 years spanning early 2020 to late 2022.
At the peak of my boxing “career”, I was sparring other girls in the gym two or three times a week. Sparring is scary and exhilarating. Each encounter was similarly patterned.
Today will be no different.
My opponent and I touch gloves and grin at each other in the center of the ring. We’re friends. We know we’ll excitedly dissect how each round went when it’s over, give each other tips, and gas each other up for especially good moves in the ring. But that’s after we fight. We retreat to our opposite corners of the ring.
There’s a split second when we’re in opposite corners where we both zero in. We’re wearing headgear, so it’s a bit hard to tell, but I’m certainly glaring at her and I’m sure she’s glaring at me. You gotta get in the zone—sparring at this stage is about trying to hurt each other. The stakes have to be high, or you’ll never get better.
The bell rings, and we stalk to the center of the ring. Gloves up by our faces. There’s a few moments where we circle each other like carrion birds. Then, a few test punches. Low intensity, measuring distance. A jab-cross comes at me. I block it, and throw it right back at her. We circle. I go for a double jab-cross and knock her head back. She stumbles backwards a few steps. She roars back at me with six punches in a row.
I put my gloves in front of my face to take the barrage, and she somehow doesn’t go for my exposed ribs. My coach is yelling at me from the sidelines to respond, to stop letting her back me down like this. I throw a short-range jab. I need to get her to give me some room. It works. I roll to the side to get myself out of a corner, to turn the tables on her. Now she’s up against the ropes.
I lay into her with hooks to the body. She’s trying to respond back, but I have the upper hand. I pause for a split second, only to hear my coach scream at me to keep going. He yells that she would show me no mercy in the same situation. He is right.
The bell rings. Round one is over. We retreat to our corners after a fist bump, panting, for a 60 second recovery before our second round begins.
Boxing is a cardio sport. People think it’s about strength—but I’ve seen dudes with six-packs and ripped thighs and huge biceps get gassed in a 2 minute round because they think they’re too strong for cardio. But boxing is a cardio sport.
Before I feel like I’ve taken 3 complete deep breaths, we’re in round 2. We’re both tired, and it’s obvious. Our shoulders are hunched, and we’re struggling to keep our hands next to our faces. But we carry on, because this is where the work begins. Boxing is an cardio-based, endurance sport. We’ll never build endurance if we don’t fight when we’re tired.
I’m confident now. I think that first round went to me. I heard my teammates from the sidelines going “holy shit, where did that come from?” They know me to be a timid fighter, but at this stage of training, I’ve crossed a threshold and have found my courage.
I lean into the strategy my coach has been hammering into my head.
“Throw more than four punches at a time, Faith” he’s constantly telling me. “More than four punches at a time. Your opponent will get scared. They’ll lose their ability to react.”
He’s mostly right about this. My opponent has now seen this strategy, so she’s putting up more resistance this round. This is a good thing. I’m starting to taste that post-fatigue strength, where everything in your body is screaming at you to stop, to rest, but there’s more work to be done, so you ignore it. You keep going. You keep throwing punches, and I do.
We are more evenly matched this round, locked in close combat in the center of the ring. Close-range fighting is all about power punches. When you are right up in each other’s grill, you’re throwing hooks and uppercuts. That’s how it works.
I throw a left hook, and land it. She tries to push me away, get some distance. I don’t let her. I throw a right hook the same time that she throws a right cross, still trying to introduce distance. Her cross lands right on my ball and socket joint, the exact joint that is moving powerfully to try to land another punch.
It’s a bad combination of events. My shoulder slides out of joint, and I know exactly what has happened. There’s a weird split second before the pain sets in. I am keenly aware that my shoulder has been dislocated, and I scream. My opponent immediately stops stock-still. My coach leaps into the ring and is behind me just as the pain arrives.
My conscious, rational mind leaves me. Any cognitive energy I have left zeroes in on a pain that defies description, a pain I would rather die than continue to experience. My brain does the next best thing. I pass out into my coach’s arms, convulse, and wake up on the ground.
After I wake up, I wish I could pass out again until it’s all over. But I can’t. I have to face down the most grueling three hours of my life. My coach calls EMS, and a team of paramedics tries a laundry list of things to get me out of the boxing ring I am still in, and to the hospital.
They try getting me to sit up, hoping that my shoulder will slide back into place on its own and they can help me walk up the stairs, out of the boxing gym, and into the ambulance. This is futile. Every time the paramedics so much as touch the arm attached to my dislocated shoulder, I panic and scream in pain. It is not a little out of joint. It’s completely out of its socket. It won’t go back in on its own.
There’s some vaguely present, rational part of myself hovering over this entire scene. This part knows that screaming every time they touch me isn’t helping. It knows I should try to tough it out so that we can get me to the hospital and solve the problem. That rational part is smoke on the wind. This baser, more primal part of myself is a gale wiping anything else from my mind. Except for the pain, and what I can do to make sure I don’t feel more of it.
The paramedics abandon trying to get me to sit up. They set about trying to brace my arm against my body so they can get me onto a stretcher. It’s currently in a goalpost position. They have a long way to go to get it against my body. I am unable to tolerate them touching my arm at all, much less moving my arm any closer to my body. I shriek every time they try. They do their damndest to talk me down. They are unsuccessful. I am completely out of control of my responses. I am an animal trapped in a barbed cage. Every slight movement is agony. I know now in retrospect I was a nightmare of a patient.
This entire 3 hour ordeal of the paramedics trying and failing and trying and failing to get me out of the ring has me a slave to my impulses. I am a completely different person this entire time. I am deaf to the pleas of my fiancé telling me “they’re just trying to help”. I am immune to my usual empathy and respect for first responders. Anyone attempting to increase my pain is the enemy. I don’t care if they’re trying to help, they’re making me hurt more.
The firefighters get called in. They bring a collapsible stretcher and wedge it underneath me, one excruciating piece at a time. Five firefighters carry my dead weight up the stairs. They are completely unbothered by my wailing and screaming the entire time. To their credit, they speak kindly to me. They placidly tell me “Oh man, yeah, this sucks. We’re getting you to the right place.” I don’t respond, but my ephemeral conscious part flits in and stores that information for later.
The ride to the hospital from my boxing gym is only 7 minutes, but it feels like an eternity. I feel every pothole in the road, every hard brake to avoid some psychopath crossing the street at the wrong time, every slight bump. I pray for unconsciousness or death the whole time to a god I don’t believe in. My pleas go unanswered.
We arrive at the hospital. I am hit with a fresh wave of terror knowing they have to transfer me out of the ambulance and to the ER itself. They are not allowed to give me any more pain medication than they already have. The pain medication lasts for maybe 2 or 3 minutes before it wears off, so what’s the point?
I scream the whole way in from the ambulance to the ER. I am seen immediately. My smoky, barely-there conscious part finds this really funny. This is the only time I’ve ever immediately been seen in an ER, so I suppose the excruciating pain is at least serving me in receiving immediate care once we’re at the hospital.
I’m panicking in the ER room once they settle me down in a hospital bed. I know what comes next. My shoulder has been dislocated for 3 continuous hours now. Field medics aren’t allowed to put dislocated joints back in—it’s too risky. They just sort of hope it goes back in by itself. But my shoulder is stubbornly out of place, and someone is going to have to put it back in.
One of the ER doctors tries to adjust the makeshift brace that my still-goalpost-shaped arm is in, and I wail in response. He looks at me, clearly exasperated, and goes “Ma’am, can you please try to calm down.”
He doesn’t know I’m incapable of speech right now. He’s utterly unaware that I’m an animal with a limb trapped in a barbed jaw with no control over myself. I just cry. Needing medical care is often a parade of humiliations.
Another ER doctor tells him to stop messing with my arm, and comes to talk to me. He informs me that they’re going to put a nerve block in my arm, and give me a sedative. Am I okay with both those things? I nod frantically, desperate for anything that will return me to my conscious self.
The sedation and nerve block take some time to kick in. When they do, an orthopedic doctor comes in and puts my joint back where it’s supposed to be with little fanfare. I feel no pain, just an unsettling scrape of bone-on-bone as he puts it back. They put me in a sling, and send me home with ibuprofen for the pain. I am too tired to laugh at the absurdity of being offered only over-the-counter pain medication for the most traumatic pain I have ever felt in my life.
I go home and face down over a year of recovery, including corrective surgery, before my shoulder feels halfway normal again. I religiously avoid anything that causes even minor risk to my shoulder. I would rather die than feel that pain ever again, and I mean that literally.
I had to experience that same intensity of pain this week for a biopsy. The pain was present for about 5-7 harrowing seconds and wrenched sobs from my unwilling, already embarrassed self. The pain was not there for nearly as long as it was this week as it was when my shoulder incident happened a few years ago.
My body remembered, though. She, just like every other human body, writes these experiences in permanent ink on walls I can’t always find. They just reveal themselves every so often.
I hate having to walk clear-eyed into painful experiences like this biopsy and immediately having to fight tooth and fucking nail against the part of me that remembers just how horrifying pain can become, and will do anything to keep me from being there again.
I don’t know. Sometimes we have to do things that make us feel like an exposed nerve, and we don’t have another choice. I wish there was a better way.
i’m talking about vestigial structures and unused DNA here. everyone’s got em!