Okay, Let's Try Again...

So, I got this book Managing Pain Before It Manages You (Margaret A. Caudill) quite awhile ago, which is basically a pain management how-to guide. I started out fine, kept a pain diary and all (the one with the rating of pain and emotion levels three times a day) but stopped following the program once school began.

Anyway, I think it's about time I got back to it. Especially on account of the crazy Vicodin side effects, which are just unpleasant. So, I'll try to keep up blogging about how that goes.

Also, I'm getting A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary (Andrew Levy) from Amazon later this week. Hopefully, I can learn from his experiences with migraines. I read Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation- about depression- and it really helped me reflect on the reality of how selfish a person is when depressed (I mean to say that I was/am, at least!). It should be helpful, I think, to learn from another person's experiences with chronic pain.

Similarly, I'm going to keep posting any nice headache/pain poems I find. I like to see how other people put their conditions to words-- even if I can't!

Lastly, I'm going to try to get a copy of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Elaine Scarry). Here is the product description from Amazon.com:

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.

Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

Goodnight!

P: 7

M: 7