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What Good News Can Mean to the Suffering, or Making Pain Great Again
By Charles Peek
If you were in any kind of recovery program you would understand how important good news is to people recovering from anything. Well, of course, that’s pretty much everybody. Everyone is recovering from something—drugs, string bikinis, bad hair, the last self-help project, or the current home repair. The “What’s Happened to Our Weather” club is, essentially, a recovery program for people who enjoy futility.
Knowing someone is in recovery gives you helpful hints about their personality. If you knew me, for instance, you would be likely to be able to understand my level of concern over the slight headache I had last night. Those in recovery know there is no such word as “slight.” They will know instantly that most headaches cannot spell anything but a stroke in the making and most likely fast approaching death. And you will know this, too, if you are at all close to them. (There are programs for that, too, but that’s another story for another time by another person.)
My headache started last night as a pain around the back of the crown on my head. After going on hiatus overnight, it came back this morning just above my left ear. I know it was the left because it was the opposite side from the end of the row in a school class picture where a girl I was once sweet on was standing. But she is beside the point here, even aside from being beside someone in the class I don’t remember, even being momentarily still of good health while I’m probably facing lingering death after my stroke.
In recovery, or just in need of recovery, we instantly know that such a pain is an incontrovertible sign of haemmorhage. Today, some people call it a brain bleed. This label will never catch on. Two simple English words do not measure up to one word, in this case one with all of the allure of a word no one can spell, like hememhorage. Its allure comes from the fact that not being able to spell it gives a certain prestige to doctors who usually write it so no one can read whether or not they can spell it or not. This is the same principle that gave a certain eclat to alchemists and witch doctors. We congregate around those we can’t understand. This explains marriage and the popularity of the Freedom Caucus.
Hemmarage also has the benefit of being able to become hemmaragic, while you never hear anyone say brain bleedic or brain bleedagic either. You want a word that is useful in many circumstances. You have to learn the label ‘brain bleed,’ whereas, if you are in recovery, heaemourage comes immediately to mind. It came immediately to mine.
Just from a moment’s headache it became obvious it was a sign of heimraging, and the stroke could take place at any moment. That is why my wife is driving today. Thank God she was driving carefully when another car sped into the intersection against a red light. If my wife had not been driving with great care, I might have been creamed then and there and never gotten to the stroke.
(Creamed, incidentally, is a word drawn from the first part of the word ‘creature’ and the first part of the word ‘medication,’ shortened then to crea-med. Such words are called portabellos to those who are both keen on linguistics and love mushrooms, a not uncommon combination. But my apologies, I keep losing my train of thought here.)
Anyway, as I was saying, being on the passenger side I would surely have been killed before I died of the hemmreage. That would have added catastrophe to catastrophe.
(By the way, that side of the car inherited its name ‘passenger side’ from the days of carts when, for numerous reasons, passenger pigeons, which existed in the same era, usually relieved themselves in flight on the side away from the driver, largely because he held the whip. And of course, catastrophes refer to things that happen to people who make the mistake of owning cats.)
But, if you will stop distracting me and let me get on with my point, you can see that for people in recovery any good news can only be too welcome when we perceive so much bad news just naturally. That’s why, even as I was preparing for my stroke, I was remembering how our own country leads the world in the production of things that keep us from getting into other things, especially food products.
This realization first struck me just yesterday when we were preparing to enjoy our soup and went to open the cellophane like sleeve in which crackers usually come. The sleeve has a seam down one whole side so you can tell almost immediately where the sleeve is less likely to open. I don’t really know if cellophane is the right word. Possibly it is wax paper of a sort, the sort that is neither wax nor paper. Whatever the right word, the stuff doesn’t want to tear even where there is no seam.
Most people adept at soup and crackers eventually get the top seal on the pack to open just enough that they can pry out the crackers one at a time through the narrow slit, which is perfect because this way they are pre-crumbled for your soup.
Breakfasts pose an even greater challenge because they often involve cartons of milk or cream. Those cartons have clear directions on one side that read: open this side. This is a little joke from the production line workers who know this is the side they glue and their fellow workers in the glue factor make the best glue in the world. This is another credit to our country. And a sign of union solidarity.
With patience you can become adept at this, too. The proper technique is to pry open the first stage, spreading the two folded wings out, and then with some sharp object make a slit through the glue keeping the flaps from opening. The glue will often go deeper than you’d think, so be patient. Incidentally, from my wife’s hurried response, I’d say the sharp object is maybe best not your usual finger nail file. Though, I’d have to say, it always works for me.
We are constantly reminded that we eat too much in our country. Whole populations have to diet rigorously to keep the surface weight of the planet in balance. The packaging and glue manufacturers are not only producing the most durable food packaging in the world, but also by making accessing our food more difficult and painstaking, they are helping someone in China to ease up a bit and eat more, and this in turn restores the trade balance between our countries.
(I won’t go into what is happening to the trade balanced just now but it would sure be worth a blog if only I had enough time left to write it, which is doubtful with my fast impending stroke and subsequent shuffle off of the old mortal coil.)
I do wish I knew the names of the heroic gluers and plastic container makers. I was going to research this before I was struck with my impending stroke. I was interrupted just after learning that ‘plas” comes from plasma and ‘tic’ means a nervous jerking motion that, if it is not quickly stilled, will require a transfusion. Which you also may need if you suffer a brain bleed, a phrase as easy to say after you’ve had a stroke as the world haemmurhage.
But I didn’t write this when I had better things to do, like repent and be saved, just for a few odd facts about spelling and etymology (a word that will be explained in my next blog if there is one). I wrote this so you would first know and then remember that everything positive helps ease the mental quirks of all of us who need to be in recovery.
Which is pretty much all of us. But now I’m repeating myself. Probably, my wife says, another sure sign of a stroke coming on. She’s may well be right again. The pain has gone away—another bad sign.
Kearney, Nebraska
May 2018
PS No blogs until fall now. Lucky you!
capeek 