Updates, notes, and the monster under my bed
a little over a week ago I went to see a new doctor. I didn't like the one I had seen before, and I was pretty much in despair about how my hands felt. So off I went. I knew almost immediately that I liked this doctor better. He asked questions about the friend who referred me to him , listened carefully to the history I gave him, and did about six more diagnostic tests and the person I had seen previously. And though what he said was in some ways difficult, it was also reassuring, because it told me part of what I already knew in my heart. He said that if I had tendinitis it should have been getting better. He said that with all the rest, massage, ice, splinting, and physical therapy, not to mention anti-inflammatory drugs, that tendinitis would have responded. Rather, he believes that I have nerve involvement which, he hastened to add, doesn't mean that what I'm experiencing is psychosomatic or that I'm crazy. It is just that the nerves and brain have gotten involved in some strange way. So he gave me a prescription for a drug called Neurontin, told me to call him in two week's, and to see them again in a month.
That was on a Monday. On Tuesday night I took my first dose of the Neurontin. On Wednesday, my hands still hurt, but the quality of the pain was entirely different. Instead of the hot, splintering pain that I had been feeling previously, my hands and forearms had a deep ache that felt more muscular. They also hurt in places different from where they usually hurt, the thumbs, for example, instead of up by the elbow. The pain was just as bad as it had been the day before, but the change in quality was itself a relief -- it was good to know that my hands could feel something different. And then the next day, Thursday, they almost didn't hurt at all. And in general, things have been much much better.
This isn't quite the magic bullet. The doctor warned me not to up my activity level, but it was a little bit hard for me to not push when things felt so much better. Accordingly, and unsurprisingly, I did too much on Monday and on Tuesday morning and yesterday and today I have been paying for it, although they are calming down already. A week ago such a setback would've had me in tears, but having had a week of respite, just that one week even, has made it a lot easier for me to be gentle with myself and my body while I work on coming back down to a more pain-free level.
As a dancer, learning to work through pain is a necessary survival skill. Some days you are sore, some days you are cramped, some days you have blisters, and some days you're doing things you really probably shouldn't, but you have a plum part or a rehearsal with somebody that he wants to impress or a fit of anger you don't know how to work off in any other way than by dancing, so you keep going. Almost all dancers have, at some point, the experience of running into a healthcare professional who tells them that they just need to quit dancing and generally we end up blowing those people off. Accordingly you learn, sometimes imperfectly, when it is okay to push through the pain and when it is the kind of pain that simply insists that you stop. This set of lessons has been useful to me in my life as a dancer, but it is a hard set of lessons to unlearn in the case of my hands. In the studio, I can tell myself that I am doing what I am doing for just another 10 or 15 minutes. If things are really bad I can modify the step, change how high I throw my legs or do just a releve instead of a ful pierrouette, or not jump. And really, most of the time it's fine. But this is not true in the case of my hands, where the line is much blurrier on the process of recovery much slower. I can't do another five minutes of washing dishes, or another 10 minutes of surfing the net, or chop just one onion instead of two. The pain from pushing through doesn't stop once I stop whatever activity I'm engaged in, it is carried with me for the rest of my day and sometimes into the next.
I know I am learning lessons from this summer, but I don't know what they are yet. I hate the process by which we glorify suffering, the notion that pain is somehow "worth it" if we come out the other side stronger or wiser or a better person. Mostly I think that the bullish attitude. But I also find myself needing to hold on to that set of ideas, to believe that when I leave here, this space of pain and limitation, I'll carry something with me -- perhaps a beautiful stone, pale and smooth, I'll be able to hand the others and say "look, I brought this for you, maybe it will help you too."
That was on a Monday. On Tuesday night I took my first dose of the Neurontin. On Wednesday, my hands still hurt, but the quality of the pain was entirely different. Instead of the hot, splintering pain that I had been feeling previously, my hands and forearms had a deep ache that felt more muscular. They also hurt in places different from where they usually hurt, the thumbs, for example, instead of up by the elbow. The pain was just as bad as it had been the day before, but the change in quality was itself a relief -- it was good to know that my hands could feel something different. And then the next day, Thursday, they almost didn't hurt at all. And in general, things have been much much better.
This isn't quite the magic bullet. The doctor warned me not to up my activity level, but it was a little bit hard for me to not push when things felt so much better. Accordingly, and unsurprisingly, I did too much on Monday and on Tuesday morning and yesterday and today I have been paying for it, although they are calming down already. A week ago such a setback would've had me in tears, but having had a week of respite, just that one week even, has made it a lot easier for me to be gentle with myself and my body while I work on coming back down to a more pain-free level.
As a dancer, learning to work through pain is a necessary survival skill. Some days you are sore, some days you are cramped, some days you have blisters, and some days you're doing things you really probably shouldn't, but you have a plum part or a rehearsal with somebody that he wants to impress or a fit of anger you don't know how to work off in any other way than by dancing, so you keep going. Almost all dancers have, at some point, the experience of running into a healthcare professional who tells them that they just need to quit dancing and generally we end up blowing those people off. Accordingly you learn, sometimes imperfectly, when it is okay to push through the pain and when it is the kind of pain that simply insists that you stop. This set of lessons has been useful to me in my life as a dancer, but it is a hard set of lessons to unlearn in the case of my hands. In the studio, I can tell myself that I am doing what I am doing for just another 10 or 15 minutes. If things are really bad I can modify the step, change how high I throw my legs or do just a releve instead of a ful pierrouette, or not jump. And really, most of the time it's fine. But this is not true in the case of my hands, where the line is much blurrier on the process of recovery much slower. I can't do another five minutes of washing dishes, or another 10 minutes of surfing the net, or chop just one onion instead of two. The pain from pushing through doesn't stop once I stop whatever activity I'm engaged in, it is carried with me for the rest of my day and sometimes into the next.
I know I am learning lessons from this summer, but I don't know what they are yet. I hate the process by which we glorify suffering, the notion that pain is somehow "worth it" if we come out the other side stronger or wiser or a better person. Mostly I think that the bullish attitude. But I also find myself needing to hold on to that set of ideas, to believe that when I leave here, this space of pain and limitation, I'll carry something with me -- perhaps a beautiful stone, pale and smooth, I'll be able to hand the others and say "look, I brought this for you, maybe it will help you too."