What a scream

I’ve been mentally AWOL and haven’t posted, instead getting myself all bent out of shape over a few of things that made me think about other things that … & so on, loop-de-loop. Today I’m spending the day in bed because I woke up very badly this morning. It feels as though my blood pressure is hovering around 80 over 65 right now — low and barely there. I can sort of feel my pulse, but not much. Today marks the third time in my life that I’ve fainted from pain. The first time was when I was quite little and the fainting was a way to escape a bad situation; the second when I was a teenager and had a medical iintervention; the third this morning when a leg cramp woke me up and the pain became mentally so unmanageable that it overwhelmed me with memories from that very first time (this relates to the above point re. getting bent out of shape). A leg cramp! It’s all in the head, but the body remembers, it remembers very very well. I wrote about torture a few days back, about walls falling away to reveal limitless horror — like that, that’s how the body remembers. The blood starts pounding in your ears, you feel adrift, you cannot connect to boundaries or to beauty, you want to throw up very very badly. And you pass out.

There’s pain that has a purpose, and there’s pain that doesn’t. The pain of childbirth has a purpose and I had no problem with it. My kids were both born at a free-standing birth centre, with no drugs on the premises, nor doctors. I had an intuition that if I were to go to a hospital, I’d end up with a cesaerean, which I didn’t want: I wasn’t afraid of giving birth, but I was afraid of that kind of intervention. As it turned out, my first-born’s birth probably would have been a c-section delivery in a hospital: 3 hours into the pushing contractions, which had taken about 15 hours to kick in fully, the midwives had to call the hospital across the street to report, and basically to alert the doctor(s) and staff to a possible emergency. After yet another hour or so of torturous pushing contractions only seconds apart, Adam was finally born. His birth had taken so long because he was facing the wrong way (face up instead of down, chin out instead of neatly tucked in), and his right fist was jammed to his forehead in a kind of revolutionary salute. So I know from pain, ok, and when I say a leg cramp tossed me to the floor, I mean it was in the leg, but it was also a deep, deep cramp of the memory-variety.

The “pain” of childbirth is peanuts compared to pain that comes with fear (and if you fear childbirth, your pain will be frightening). If you understand that pain has some purpose, and there is nothing happening to your body that it can’t handle or wasn’t built to take, pain is manageable: that’s what all the good childbirth classes are about, mental preparation. But when pain comes from beyond, when it is inflicted, it has the ability to unhinge your mind with fear. Intuitively we probably all suspect this, having considered the pain that comes from a heart attack, say, which quickly overwhelms and unhinges; the pain that we expect must come with violent death; the pain that comes with wasting diseases or cancer. Or torture and abuse. Pain whose biological purpose is obtuse (unlike childbirth’s) or worst of all: inflicted by others.

If I had high blood pressure, I probably would have keeled over with an exploding artery; as it is, mine is low, and so I just crashed. Crashed, crashed, crashed, wanting to throw up.

Best of all, it is raining like mad today. Sure, everybody thinks that it always rains in the Northwest, but Victoria is in a rain shadow: it’s not that deluge-y here. It rains, but typically it’s drizzly. Today however has been a howler. Raining like the flood. All that water pressure out there is just making me feel the lack of pressure in my bloodstream more acutely. Maybe the rain will give me my strength back.