On The "Virtues" Of Vicodin

Last week, while in a meeting for parents about to send a child off to college, I could not help but think of death. You see, I had just come from the fitness club where I train; at the club there is a man who in his thirties suffered a stroke after one particularly arduous workout. As a result of that devastating stroke, that man now walks around the gym sliding a lame leg and awkwardly managing a lame arm. I recall him telling me not too long ago that, right after his ill-fated workout 10 years ago, he went home with a splitting headache. Later that night he collapsed. The rest, as we say, is history.

So while meditating on a dragging leg and a lame arm as I strained to listen to a guidance counselor, I sat in my auditorium chair seized by the realization that I was suffering the worst headache I could ever recall. Pain radiated through my jaw, up my cheek, under my left eye and on up into wherever pain goes. It was almost impossible to keep from lying down on the floor. Panic nearly set in. Inevitability and futility were words that came to mind. I thought of asking if anyone present had a weapon.

As I've said before here -- though only in passing -- I am a patient of a nearby orthodontist. I've been dealing with braces for the past 4.5 years; the process included moving a molar some considerable distance. But during that process, the molar became brutally temperature-sensitive, its root being left slightly exposed. Needless to say, hot or cold, anything other than 98.6 degrees could send me soaring.

And thus I chalked my pain up to something dental. And I was right: I was not having a stroke. But I was wrong about the intensity of the experience, for the pain just got ridiculous over the weekend. And why wouldn't it, now that I've learned that the temperature-sensitive tooth is currently sporting a raging infection? No wonder my left eye closes and tears in pain, and my brain slows to a crawl as I wait for some relief. Antibiotics can't work fast enough; and the pain-killers I've been given work for but a short time (I refuse to take a whole dose because I am pill-phobic -- and, without question, supremely tough).

All this to say that I am in the throes of a double whammy: temperature changes of the slightest kind course through a wimpy tooth and slam into an abscess. That I have a healthy perspective regarding those whose pain is far more insufferable is true, but I cannot help but wonder how painful pain can be. I mean, when I am asked to scale pain between 1 and 10, I always ask (myself, of course) to what the scale is compared. Pain, it seems, teaches us at least one thing: Today's 10 can be tomorrow's 25.

I pray it isn't so, for anyone.

Peace.

Bill Gnade