Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash
When my daughter was in middle school, she developed an interest in what we called “lotions and potions.” She started by making skin creams and lip balms, foot scrubs and facial masks. Then she graduated to making soap, which requires precise measurement of ingredients and temperatures in order for the chemical reaction to occur, saponification, where the liquids bond and become solid.
We would begin by placing a cooking pot on our kitchen scale, and then we would press the button marked “tare.” This would zero out the scale, even while the pot still sat on it. Then we would pour in the olive oil, careful at the end to get to the exact number of grams. Again, we would press “tare,” and the scale would register the weight as zero. Then we would spoon in the coconut oil, and—you get the picture. After each addition, we could reset the scale to zero, which allowed us to take the measure of each discreet ingredient, even while we were mixing them.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a “tare” button of our own? To be able to reset our scale to zero each time a weight is added to it? After all, there is a limit to what can be borne. With a button like that, you could prevent, or at least deny, accumulation. Viola! Look: it weighs nothing.
I am lying on my back underneath a blanket. A woman’s face looks up at me from the foot of the table.
“How does this feel?” she asks as she draws her knuckle across the arch of my left foot. “On a scale of 1-10.”
I say, “Two.” She does the same for my right foot, and I say again, “Two,” but my face contorts into a more-than-two grimace, so she asks again. Her face is kind, her hands warm and reassuring but not gentle. Sometimes her hands hurt me, but the relief afterwards, the space between my ribs, the release in my hip joints, the way my feet can breathe again—that is what I am here for: to loosen what has tightened, to straighten what has twisted, to realign my body so that I can, quite literally, stand on my own two feet. I mean, I already do stand on my own two feet. My husband and I raised two children. In 2015, my first book was published, and my first essay. That same year, I also cut off contact with my mother. I am at peace with that decision. Relieved, almost. Certainly, I feel lighter than I ever have.
The pain in my feet has taken me by surprise.
“Two!” I say to the masseuse, more loudly than is necessary. She’s right there.
She looks up at me, surprised. Until this moment, I have been a cheerful and grateful client.
“I hate that pain scale,” I say.
Her eyebrows ask why.
“Because,” I say, “I never know how much room to leave for—you know—the worst I can imagine.”
“How else will I know how much pressure to use?” she asks. “I mean now,” she says. She releases my foot and rests her hands on my ankles. “All I’m asking for is how much pain you feel right now.”
For me to rate my present pain would require me to separate what I experience now from what I have experienced before. It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s just that it isn’t as simple as it seems.
How much pain on a scale of 1-10? Questions are raised.
How much pain am I allowed to have? I’ve been told that I am too sensitive, that I am too stoic, that I don’t know what I am feeling.
How much pain can I tolerate? They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but they might be confusing surviving with living.
How does this pain compare to previous pain? Comparison would require lining up the usual lurking suspects when I have done my tenuous best to remove the weight of them from my body and its memory.
There is little room for an absolute, a “just now” in the answer.
I first learned the limits of absolutes back when we moved across the country to New Mexico. My husband had driven the car with the dog, and I had flown with our daughter, who was not quite four. My husband met us at the airport in Albuquerque on a sunny November afternoon. It was sixty degrees, and as we stood waiting at the baggage claim, we snorted at the locals, who were bundled into their winter jackets, but when summer rolled around and the temperatures soared well above 100, the winter coats made more sense. If sixty degrees was warm, when did it get hot? What would 100 degrees be considered? At what point would the heat become unbearable?
Ironically, as well as instructively, when we moved to Montana two years later, that same sixty degrees that sent New Mexicans to dig out their winter layers was the temperature at which Montanans deemed it warm enough to open the town pool. It’s not that New Mexicans don’t understand heat or Montanans cold, just the opposite. They live in lands of extremes. They don’t minimize the extent of those extremes, but they do adjust the scale to mitigate their experience of those extremes. And they leave room, at the end of the scale, just out of range, for suffering. Call it acclimatization or a mind trick or call it, simply, endurance.
I have never, since the pain scale came into common use, labeled my pain as anything above a five.
Four years before the bodywork session, I was lying on my back on another table, my knees spread wide, while the doctor tried, for the third time, to inject enough anesthesia into my cervix to numb it.
I seem to have a physical resistance to anesthesia: when three injections directly into a nerve in my armpit didn’t work—a different surgery—the surgeon knocked me out with a general. After a dentist tried three times to numb a tooth to finish a root canal—the second on that tooth—he opted to pull the tooth out entirely.
What is it, I wonder, with the three tries?
Anyway, as I said, I was on the table with my legs spread, having been thrice stuck with a needle to no avail.
“We can try again another time,” said the doctor. “I don’t want you to suffer.”
I shook my head. No. There was no other time. Since I had received the results of the biopsy, “You have cancer,” I was acutely aware that there was no other time than the present.
A different doctor had announced that news to me after I had waited in his office for over an hour. I put a finger on the page of my book and closed it when he came in. My husband had been waiting with me out in the main waiting room, but he had received a phone call and stepped out just a minute before they called me back to the doctor’s office. I thought my husband might come find me. I thought it might be over quickly. I thought I might be OK.
But no. The doctor was fairly chipper when he delivered the news. I suppose he, too, had to adjust the scale in order to live with the weight of so many other people’s fear.
Just weeks after the biopsy, I was having a LEEP procedure, where they slice off the face of the cervix and cauterize it at the same time. This would help the doctor determine the extent of the cancer. I did not want to wait to make another appointment for her to try again in six weeks. Six weeks was a long time to not think ahead.
It would be fast. I could take it. So the hot wire or the electrified wire—I’m sure she told me which but I guess I wasn’t paying attention—burned through my tainted flesh. I could see smoke rising from between my legs. The room filled with a horrid stench. It was me, my body burning, although the doctor and the technician didn’t seem bothered. Is there a scale of 1-10 for a bad smell? It really is a matter of what you are used to.
They didn’t ask me that day to rate my pain. While I was feeling the wire, I thought I would collapse. Not onto the table—I was already lying down. I thought my skin, my body, would just implode, until all that was left was that one part of me, burning. Suspecting there was worse to come, I would have given it, still, only a solid five.
There was more to come. Surgery. Other procedures. More pain, as you would expect, but in the manageable range. My pain, my fear, was relatively minor on the cancer scale. I was ready. I could take it.
I was not prepared, however, for the loneliness.
After the surgery, I wanted my mother. I was less than a year into no-contact. I could have called her, just that once, but what I really needed was mothering, not my mother. I think we all want someone who won’t run from our suffering, someone who can hold it and us. Perhaps I am dreaming. Perhaps that all-encompassing mother exists in the 5-10 realm, that place where, if it got really bad, we believe she would show up. The place we will never go because we don’t want to find out that she won’t, and, worse, that we can’t take it when she doesn’t.
When I had let my sisters know about my diagnosis, my younger sister sent me a curt message advising me to have my ovaries removed as a precaution. In response to a general request for recommendations on Facebook, my older sister suggested I watch “Friday Night Lights” during my recovery. It was perfect. I had never binge-watched anything before, and there were several seasons of compelling characters and great storytelling. I appreciated that. But she never called to see how I was doing.
I was the one who carried them through their crises. No one likes role reversal.
This is what it means, I thought, to choose no contact with your mother. This is what it means when that metastasizes.
I expected the pain, but the loneliness was worse. Had you asked me then to rate my loneliness on a scale of 1-10, I think I would have admitted that—forgive me, but I notice that I am interchanging pain and loneliness. It’s important to know the difference, to keep them separate. Perhaps it is a matter of adjusting one’s scale.
Lea Page’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Pinch, Stonecoast Journal, Sycamore Review, Pithead Chapel, High Desert Journal, riverSedge and Slipstream. She is also the author of Parenting in the Here and Now (Floris Books, 2015). She lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.