Pain Tolerance

I like to think I have a high tolerance for pain.  When I was in junior-high and high school, I played football, a sport that demands a lot of pain tolerance:  seems like every drill, every game includes pain that one must simply play through or else sit out on the sidelines.  I've played through a lot of pain, even a broken hand (which I learned about fourteen years later when I re-broke it lifting cast iron skillets), so I tend to think I can tolerate quite a lot of pain.

Two events recently have made me question just how much tolerance I do have to pain.  First, I ran out of Abilify.  Since I'm unemployed and have no prescription drug insurance, my psychiatrist has been supplying me with Abilify through medical samples.  A couple of weeks ago, I ran out and decided, rather than stop by my psychiatrist's office for a refill, I'd see how difficult my depression would be without Abilify.  Whether because of how abruptly I stopped or the efficacy of the med, after three days or so I hit a disastrous low emotionally, so painful it seemed that I had actually regressed since my relapse a year ago, that I now hurt more than I did a year ago.  I was able to tolerate this for only two or three days before I got more Abilify and, gladly, took it.

Then, the very first day of my and Nancy's backpacking trip on the Appalachian trail, as we were climbing five miles of uphill out of Davenport Gap, I pulled a muscle in my left hip.  Now, I've pulled plenty of muscles in my life, not the least playing football for six years, so my pulling one hiking is not necessarily a sign of advancing age (as I seem to react much more often these days).  And the palliative is pretty standard:  give the muscle two day's of rest, then gradually work back up to full participation or, not having that luxury, take pain meds as much as needed.  Sadly, Nancy and I had neglected to refill our supply of ibuprofen (good ol' Vitamin I) before we began, so we were without pain meds.  On our second day, during an initial two miles of uphill, I simply couldn't go on, so we had to come off the trail (hiking an additional eight miles to do so, and being preserved from hiking an additional fifteen miles to the nearest town by the chance passing of friendly locals in a pickup truck, who drove us all the way to Newport).

So how much pain can I really tolerate?  The question is important to me, because part of my depression is to imagine horrible ways to die - a slow, painful death by stomach or colon cancer being among those I fear the most.  As I have romanticized my depression, I've seen it as training in pain tolerance:  so much of my life I have lived in emotional pain - just as real, I assure you, as physical pain - I figured myself for one hardened and wizened, capable of bearing the most agonizing pain.  Now, I'm not so sure.  It's so hard to measure pain:  did my pulled muscle hurt so bad that I couldn't continue to hike because it was, say, a seven or eight out of a possible ten (as I imagined it to be), or was it really a two or three and I was just weak?  Same with my emotional pain:  am I severely depressed, as I certainly felt once the Abilify had worn off, or only mildly depressed and simply can't handle a lot of emotional pain?

Ultimately, there's no comparing one's pain to another's:  we each feel our own pain, and what feels bad really feels bad no matter any "objective" measurement.  Our pain scales are always subjective:  what feels like an eight is an eight for that day in those circumstances.  But I fear that very subjectivity, I fear not really knowing what an eight feels like, and that some day I will truly and fully feel an eight, or a nine, or a ten.  Perhaps my years of emotional pain have not hardened me to pain, but, like constantly worrying an open sore, have actually made me more susceptible to pain, less tolerant.  As I try to imagine the next thirty years of my life, and my imagination does not include pain-free years, I would like to be able to imaging a life much less hobbled by pain than the last thirty years.  If I'm growing more susceptible, then the life I imagine grows less desirable.  Pain hampers my imagination.  Thank you for reading.