I was in a very dark mood yesterday because of the intensity of my pain. Unable to sleep – as I often am – last night I went searching through the WordPress community for interesting things to read. Sometimes I search through the list of blogs I follow in the Reader, while at other times I randomly select a tag to see what others are writing about under different topics. Last night, or early this morning, I chose to search under the tag ‘death’ because I had attached it to yesterday’s post.
What I found wasn’t as morbid or bleak as one might expect. Not that I didn’t find some heartbreaking posts, but I also found inspirational and philosophical writing from many members of the community. One of the posts I read was about an excerpt of a letter from Pier Giorgio Frassati a beatified early twentieth century Italian Catholic social activist. The letter was in response to a friend who had not heard from him for a long while, who wrote to him asking if he was dead. In his response Frassati wrote, “Dead – what does this word mean?”
He then details definitions of death for his friend, and goes on to say, “But if we’re talking about the word in its true essence, then sadly not only am I dead, but already resuscitated a number of times only – alas! to die again.” The post I read this in came from the site Contemplative in the Mud, whose author seemed to have had a bit of a day herself/himself, or at least was introspective about the ups and downs of life. The nice thing for me, after reading this post, was that it opened me up to write some poetry in the early morning hours, which distracted me, at least for a little while, from my pain.
Can pain kill you? According to the responses from my Google search, yes, it can.
Some days, like today, I feel like my pain might kill me. I know that might sound over-the-top, but if you’ve never experienced debilitating pain, there’s no other way for me to describe it. When I used to get frequent blinding migraines or my monthly menstrual cramps made it impossible for me to get out of bed, I always took comfort in knowing that those pains would eventually end. Now, with this pain, there is never any relief. There is no day on the calendar or time frame after taking medication that I can look forward to because they mean there will be an end to the pain threatening to split my skull open or implode my reproductive organs. The pain radiating from deep in the right side of my pelvis, out towards both hips, down both legs, and up my back has no schedule or half-life to which I can look forward in anticipation of relief.
Some days, like today, the pain is so unbearable; walking, standing, or even sitting still, hurt so badly I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know what to do with this anxious energy racing through me that probably adds to the frenetic activity within my nervous system and amps up the pain. I don’t know how to make myself comfortable when I sit because no surface can ever be soft enough against my aching tender skin. While just the thought of trying to rub and massage the hurting parts of myself makes me cringe and nauseated to the point of wanting to vomit.
If the pain, like the type of pain I feel, can kill a person by pushing them to suicide, I can understand why. I’m not, by any means, contemplating ending my life, but I’m uncertain about how long – it’s been three years already – I can live like this not knowing when or if I will get any pain relief. How long can I continue to accept being characterized as a “mystery patient” by my doctors who can’t pinpoint why my body is still reacting, to a growth that is no longer in my pelvis, before it becomes too much to bear? A psychological episode most likely will not be what brings my life to its end. It could very well be the stress of constant pain on my body that makes my blood pressure boil over, causing a stroke, or my blood could become poisoned by the copious amount of opioid pain medications I take, leading my organs to start to fail. Que sera sera…
I know none of this is helpful or optimistic, but this is where my pain sends my mind on days like today when I hurt so badly I don’t know what to do with myself.
Today, Apple released its much-anticipated iPhone 7, with the usual fanfare to a gaggle of media and Apple acolytes, who seem to wait with bated breath each time a new version of an i-something is announced. Yesterday, I picked up my replacement iPhone 6s. There was no excited anticipation, or celebration, on my part and it took less than ten minutes for the representative at my local Apple Store’s Genius Bar to hand me my replacement phone after removing it from a nondescript white box and inserting my phone’s SIM card. My replacement phone, or as Apple calls it: a ‘service phone’, is a refurbished iPhone 6s that replaces the brand new, shiny, Space Gray, iPhone 6s I bought at the end of June that was defective out-of-the-box.
The store representative was happy to send me on my way after that brief interaction. My destination was home, to load my backed up data on to this replacement and pretend the defective phone was replaced with something new. The problem is, I know it’s not new. I know – because I asked someone an unexpected question – that Apple’s policy is to replace their products, when they are defective out-of-the-box, with refurbished products. Products that have had part(s) interchanged within their shells when they have failed diagnostics tests that indicate a hardware, not a software flaw; and knowing that makes me feel like crap because it’s not in any way – at least not to me – comparable to the phone the I paid hundreds of dollars for roughly two months ago. A decision I feel stupid for making, not because I’m an avid Apple fan, but on the basis that I didn’t have to learn how to use a new manufacturer’s phone and that my iPhone 4 had been reliable for four years so I believed this new improved model should be just as good.
In recent conversations I’ve had with Apple Support representatives, they’ve made it clear to me that Apple doesn’t have a problem explaining and supporting this policy of replacing the defective products people pay hundreds of dollars for with refurbished equipment. Even the Apple Store manager, to whom I made it clear that I paid out-of-pocket for my phone, when she flippantly suggested that my phone was a freebie I received as part of a locked-in-until-your-kids-are-old-enough-to-drive contract many people sign on to with their mobile phone service providers, only stumbled for a moment before getting back on-message. Not even my mobile service provider was aware that this happens with Apple’s defective out-of-the-box products, until I called them to see what options I might have in lieu of accepting what I consider a sub-standard replacement. In fact, the representative I spoke with stated, that he’d never had another customer call with my issue and that “I’m dumbstruck, especially coming from Apple that’s supposed to be the ‘Cadillac’ of companies,” when I explained some of the Apple Store manager’s rationale for why they use ‘service phones’.
I guess giving customers refurbished product must be at the top of the lesser-known policies Apple uses to grow profits and keep a high percentage of product market share, while presenting their glossy image – as they did today at the iPhone 7 launch – because people rarely think to ask the question I did. Now I get to walk around, until I replace my phone in another three or four years, with the displeasure of knowing that I have an iFrankenphone that was built to replace defective part(s) instead of the brand new, shiny, Space Gray, iPhone 6s I spent a shitload of money for.
Jerry Reed – She Got the Goldmine, I got The Shaft
My Small Surrenders 