Pain is a four-letter word that is difficult to define. It has an infinite number of meanings, of shades, of degrees, of intensities--as many as the earth has fingerprints. My version of pain, both physical and mental, is mine alone. The only way you can know or understand it would be if you could plop inside this fifty-year old body and slouch around the way I do for a few hours.
My idea of intense pain: natural childbirth. No Demerol, no epidural, no swoozy, woozy good stuff flowing into the willing vein. Just gritting your teeth, breathing, concentrating more than you ever knew possible, and getting the job done.
Sure, it hurts. But you know when you enter that weirdly gratifying place that it...will...end. And that at the end of the tunnel is a sweetly swaddled little face with midnight blue eyes lying across your exhausted body. Talk about gratification.
But there's another kind of pain. The kind that never goes away. This variety makes doctors furrow their brows and look back at the chart, wondering what they've missed. Wishing they had another pill to offer, another diagnosis to define. This pain goes by the moniker of "chronic." The addition of that one adjective is, for most, an instant death sentence to the normal life of one's dreams.
That word, along with a few others, has brought me here:
This small, understated sign is the only advertisement of the Mayo Clinic PRC in Rochester, Minnesota, a place where people get their lives back. To the average reader this description may be a bit melodramatic, perhaps a little over the top, smacking of a made-for-TV Lifetime movie. To a mom who's been here with her kid for three-plus weeks, it's a simple statement of fact.
The program starts out with instant, total immersion. There is no hand holding, no kum-ba-yah let's all sing a song of misery together kind of gathering in. There's a hit-the-ground running to-do list for kids and parents alike that sets folks on edge, that instantly shoves us out of our comfortably worn grooves of coping, and forces us to examine what our (and their--the kids in pain) lives have become.
That's the first pang--the first indication that this ain't gonna be easy. And that first day I knew I had to grit my teeth, bear down, concentrate and get the job done, all over again, only this time with absolutely no guarantee of how it all would end. Even worse, I had to watch my kid while she did it, too.
There are lots of long hallways here...lots of hard steps to take. And many of these kids come into the program on the first day in a wheelchair. For a lot of reasons, some due to bullheadedness, some due to luck, mine walked in on her own steam. But that fact in and of itself has amazed and awed some of the best docs in the country.
What happens behind these doors and in these rooms is a fascinating, complex process of science, humanity, and hard work. The best of the best work here and focus their fine intellects, their vast knowledge, and their expansive hearts on our kids. They know what they are about--and no matter how much the kids may balk and stumble, no matter how pissy we parents become, they never lose focus on the goal: getting these kids back to the lives they want to lead.
They aren't asking for much. In most cases they want what the rest of us take for granted: just a regular life. Or as regular as they can get it. Along the way they've lost the basics--for some it's walking, for others it's running, for some it's being able to stand up without passing out or throwing up or both. For most it's a seven-day-a-week life of normalcy that they mourn, not climbing Mt. Everest or quarterbacking the Super Bowl.
For the parents it's a blessed day or two with normal worries about normal kids: dating catastrophes, bad grades, fender benders, college applications, tuition bills.
And for the lucky few who make it here, for the lucky few who make it through, at the end of these three and a half weeks, with continued work and focus and commitment, that's exactly what we all will have.
