Translating Chronic Pain: Moments and Fragments

'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!

Tag: invisibility (Page 3 of 5)

‘D is for Dysesthesia’, by Gillian Shirreffs

May 10, 2018 /

 

 

 

 

D is for Dysesthesia
It’s also for dictionary. I’m very fond of mine. I was given it as a gift in 1993. Emblazoned on the front are the following statements:
• The foremost dictionary of current English: now thoroughly revised and expanded
• 120,000 entries and 190,000 definitions
• Over 20,000 entries new to this edition

I looked up the word dysesthesia. It’s not there. Neither is its alternate spelling: dysaesthesia.

D is for Difficult
It’s difficult to describe dysesthesia. However, the clue is in the name. I’ve learned it’s from the Greek ‘dys’, for bad, and ‘aisthesis’, for sensation. So, bad sensation. In practice, for me, this means my fingers might feel as though they’re being ground in a vice or my thighs like they’ve been splashed with acid. Or, sometimes, it’s the reverse.

 

  • by Gillian Shirreffs

USA (although I’m from Scotland originally)

‘pain and Pain’, by M-S-Y

April 23, 2018 /

The difference between lowercase-p, pain, and uppercase-P, Pain, is huge.

Bigger than just a shift-key should make it.

The difference between “Yeah, let’s go on a hike today!” and “I can’t walk today.”

The difference between pain that ends, and Pain that just backs off for a while.

The difference between the morning pills and the afternoon pills and the evening pills and the night pills and the pills and the pills and the injections and the appointments and the Pain.

The differences between the screaming in your head and the screaming locked in the gilded cage in your throat, and the knowledge that it is a bird that will never die, it will just remain in you, like a bird throwing itself against a window pane.Yes, pain and Pain are so completely different, I can’t believe they’re even spelled that same way.

 

  • by M-S-Y

United States

‘The Ache’, by Kitty Frilling

March 29, 2018 /

It wouldn’t be fair to say the ache starts
every morning as I wake.
Or truthfully that I wake at all,
more I become conscious… of the pain. 

The fire started small and young.
Fickle flickering up my spine.
Across my shoulders like a seasoned log,
spreading further, faster as I age.

It took hold.
It ravaged me, left me weak and wincing.
Scared to stretch my body,
as if it would elongate my pain. 

The ache doesn’t care how I adjust. 
Turn this hip, rest this hand, lift this leg. 
To chase it out of one limb just moves it, 
across the map of my body. 

It doesn’t listen to the pills.
Signals sent to block it in my brain. 
It weaves its way round them,
conniving and wheedling itself into my synapses.

 

  • by Kitty Frilling

Author website: www.kittyfrilling.co.uk

United Kingdom

‘The Cost of Falling Ill’, by Linda Cosgriff

March 29, 2018 /

Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can

Then you’re ill
can’t work
can’t walk
can’t bear talk
or remember how no pain felt
can count on the hand you can’t lift
your friends
and family

can’t work
or provide
can’t afford pride
or holidays
you manage Christmas, on plastic
can’t walk your children to school
it’s uphill

you’re ill
can’t work
can’t live
can’t provide –
the part that was you
the man that was you
the pride in you
died

Try not to care 
that the love of your life 
is no longer your wife 
but your carer

Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can

  • by Linda Cosgriff

Author website

United Kingdom

‘The Pits of Pain’, by Katarina Juvancic

March 14, 2018 /

For some of us the universe is a dark pit, where pain finds its home, nesting and laying eggs of destruction. The whole life reduced to this crumbled, shrank, shelled body of pain. It takes over your whole existence. Nothing can keep the pain at bay at this point, not even your best “mind-over-matter” efforts or hardest of drugs. It is torturing your soul and crippling your body. Overwhelming and ubiquitous. An epitome of Alone. A hungry demon. 

It claims you when you are too exhausted to fight. Now it has me in its claws, roaring like a wild beast, feasting on my bones, chewing my sanity and spitting out my dignity. I am too weak to resist. My presence is ethereal and fragile. I am not really here any more. I do not live anymore. I merely exist. And that is more humiliating and dehumanising than being dead.

 

Slovenia

‘Fibromyalgia’, by Zara Carpenter

March 12, 2018 /

Fibromyalgia 
My body drinks in the harsh cold of winter 
Setting my bones on fire

Hands ball up into blotched white fists 
Suddenly and viciously 
A message travels down
 
My over over sensitive nerves

Sending fingers shooting out

Dead straight

Rigor morticed with pain

Liquid churns hot in my spasming bowels 
Limp sprinting to the bathroom

I watch through open legs

As blood drips into the toilet bowl

A crimson red rose blooms

Then slowly dissolves

I am a clockwork toy

Wound too tight

The obsessions I tidied away

Are coming out of their boxes

Quicker than a child’s presents at Christmas

 

  • by Zara Carpenter

www.zaracarpenter.com

United Kingdom

‘The Velocity of Pain’, by Sonya Huber

March 11, 2018 /

I lie on the couch, but you cannot see my velocity. I have a tangential vectoring sense that pain is coiled mitochondrial speed, that while I am prone I am riding the rails deep into the future and the past at once, as if pain exposes ruptures in the time/space continuum and pulls me into the openings, as if a body at rest in pain is a body in motion through time rather than space. There is a sense of pressure on my skin as the force of time’s ungluing. There is a sense of coiled mathematical work and a formula connecting time to pain through space as I leave my location on the timeline and descend into time’s scaffolding. I am quantum, visible in two places at once. The electrons vibrate with pain, which is the pressure of the universe, the music of the planets.


United States

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