Day 267: Shrapnel

Feeling frayed today. Overstimulated, overwhelmed, low. Pressing on though.

Here's some stuff I've been looking into while researching about depression. Want to write a big thing. Not sure when, or how, but certainly feeling the impulse, feeling a lot of swirling things I want to get down and lash together into a cogent whole, both for myself, and because it's stuff I really don't think we've got a handle on as a society. What depression is, why it arises, what can be done about it. That kind of thing.

Anyway, I've been looking into the ways in which psychic pain is similar to actual physical pain. It turns out it's pretty fucking similar. Substance P, a neurotransmitter associated with inflammation and the perception of pain, is released during the experience of psychic pain just as it is when you bash your leg. The same areas of the brain, the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, light up when you experience social rejection or look at a picture of a lost partner as when you stub your toe.

Essentially it looks like - and I'm just chatting today, so I'm not going to link my references, or worry being too precise, or about plagiarising - but it looks like as we evolved it was easier to streamline the perception of pain, whether emotional or physical, through one neural system - like it was easier to send urine and semen down one pipe than to evolve two separate ones. Actually, no, don't let's think about physical and emotional pain as being like urine and semen. Just... no.

Anyway. Here's another thing. Give people suffering emotional pain a course of paracetamol, and at the end of the course their brains will have activated less in those regions I mentioned than for people to whom you prescribed a placebo.

You can alleviate emotional pain with paracetamol.

That's wild. No wonder damaged people become heroin addicts, alcoholics, stoners, heavy porn users, phone scrollers, whatever. No wonder basically every time you look at the life of an addict you find a history of trauma.

These are people in pain, and they are gravitating towards things that take that pain away. And addictive substances and behaviours do do that - they do stop things that hurt from hurting. If your life is filled with emotional pain, if you've been abused, if the world damaged you, then the suffering you feel isn't in your imagination, it isn't wishy-washy, indistinct, made-up. It's as real as physical pain.

We pretty much all agree as a society that analgesics, palliatives, painkillers are appropriate to some levels of pain. You wouldn't tell someone whose leg had been chewed off by a combine harvester, or who had been hit by shrapnel fire in a war, that they should suck it up, get on with it, pull themselves together. The extent of that pain, we recognise, may be insurmountable - it will lay them out flat, and giving them some morphine while we fix the wound is no bad thing. The pain has done its job of alerting the patient to injury, and then the skilled doctor takes over, the pain is no longer necessary, and we dope the patient up while they recover. As humans we are more acutely aware of the suffering of pain, but we are also better at finding substances to assuage pain, and that seems to be the cosmic deal. Fine.

But and so what about someone who has suffered childhood abuse and parental neglect and now lives rough on the streets? All those traumas, those major life stressors, cause colossal psychic pain - which is felt in exactly the same way as physical pain. And yet when that person medicates with heroin we turn away in disgust, we judge, we say that they are weak and dirty and stupid.

You'd do the same. You'd fucking do the same. Yes, heroin, and cocaine, and weed, and spice, and booze, end up causing even more medium and long term pain than they assuage in the short term. But let me tell you, human beings do not orient themselves towards medium and long term happiness, not without immense structure and education and planning. We are driven to seek short term happiness. All the functioning of our cells, our lizard brains, our mammalian brains on top of that, these all instinctively push us to worry about now - and it's only the last and least integrated, most recently evolved top layer of human brain that modulates behaviour towards the longer term - and this only at the best of times, fighting a battle against deeper aspects of ourselves. But when you're in pain those deeper aspects are on high alert, they bypass the later human intellect, scramble to do something right now.

So I don't know. We need to be way more wise and sensible and compassionate about emotional pain. Someone with their guts hanging out will scream for all the morphine you can give them. An abused kid on the street will reach for the needle. Same difference.

Yes, the needle doesn't heal the underlying wound, and eventually it makes everything worse - just as taking paracetamol every day for a laceration that continually reopens and bleeds anew will only end up damaging the liver.

But the answer, as a society, is not at all what we are currently doing. What we are doing is wrong - practically as well as morally - it does not help. We are not viewing stupidity on our streets, but tragedy. When we see people in indescribable pain we shouldn't judge them for taking whatever is available to get through the next moment, and minute and day. And we should work at understanding more about how their wounds were caused, and what might heal them.

Because what we're doing now isn't working. It's a long fucking way from working.

Well This Sucks

I have to admit, when I heard that I had to book the week off work due to shingles, there was a part of me that thought it’d be fun. I remember having chicken pox when I was five and spending a week over summer sequestered with my best friend in his garden, playing with our Transformer toys in the golden sunlight, having a good scratch of our spots every time our mums weren’t looking.

This is not like that. The pain is like an incessant scalding of the nerve endings in my face, and has spread right around my eye and into the upper and lower lids, which is worrying me as to long-term complications, not to mention hurting like a mother-bitch. I’m taking as many painkillers as possible, and trying without much luck to distract myself. There are definitely worse things that could be happening, but right now it’s hard work thinking of them.

I watched the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale on whatever 4oD is called these days -- good shout, Katie! -- which I thought was great, if a little reliant on voice-over narration to directly copy the strengths of the novel, rather than reforming it for a visual medium. It’s that eternal problem of adapting first-rate literature, that so much of the power is entwined within the way the book is written, rather than simply its plot, and a televised version can run the risk of illustrating the material without owning it, of telling rather than showing.

But then maybe I’m just too close to the novel, having studied it for A-Level and loved and reread it many times since. It’s hard not to notice the things that were left out, the subtleties that television isn’t good at picking up on. But certainly the performances are all excellent, the scenes with Janine and the Salvaging were very well done, and there is a drowning sense of oppression and claustrophobia, of how easily we can be turned against one another -- I’d say “more important than ever in this day and age”, but in what age is this not important? We are always vulnerable, always at risk. So far The Handmaid’s Tale does a good job of making that clear.

Another adaptation I’ve been enjoying recently is American Gods, streaming on Amazon Prime. This feels much more disassembled from its original book form and rebuilt into something new than The Handmaid’s Tale, although I confess to not having read the Neil Gaiman novel, so I can’t say for sure. Certainly, though, there are places where I hear Gaiman’s distinct voice, and the storytelling core is all him, but it’s visually intriguing in a way that I doubt came from the book, with great use of slow motion, fragmented narrative, match-cuts, and a whole host of filmic techniques to speak its meaning in a more visual language.

I know, I know -- I’m in too much pain right now to rewrite all that so it doesn’t sound insufferably pretentious. Whatever. Sue me.

I’m going to go try to shower now, although I splashed some water on my face before and it felt like the skin was melting off.

… And, OK, that was not the smartest of ideas. Water is NOT my friend. Also I look like Two-Face from Batman. Here is a picture:

I'm off to order pizza and watch a nice film to cheer myself up. Toodles x

I Have Shingles :(

If you’re thinking about getting shingles around your eye, I’ve got a tip for you: Don’t get shingles around your eye. It’s your call and everything, but I really wouldn’t recommend it.

A few days ago I got what I thought were a few spots, one on my forehead, and a cluster around my hairline. I’ve got terrible skin anyway, so this wasn’t a surprise. They hurt more than normal, but I thought that was just because of where they were on the face. When you get spots a lot you get used to the different varieties, the sore ones round the lips, the rosy red ones on the nose -- and on the forehead, where the skin is stretched tight, they can hurt like hell.

But then yesterday when I woke up the spots had become a rash across most of the top right side of my face, and it was clearly something else. It looked like a mild chemical burn, was more painful than before, and I assumed some kind of allergic reaction. I found a Boots that was open on bank holidays, and the pharmacist there gave me some strong antihistamines and told me to apply plenty of moisturiser, but he didn’t examine me closely, or seem much interested. Maybe that Guardian exposé was right. Or maybe he was just tired and distracted from working on Bank Holiday Monday. I know I hate it when I have to work bank holidays on the bar.

I dosed up and hunkered down. But then this morning the rash was worse again, what I’d thought were spots had now become welts, and another cluster had developed around my eye. And the pain, which had been awful yesterday, was now excruciating. It felt like the skin was being burned off my face.

I managed to book a same-day appointment with the nurse practitioner at my local surgery, and within minutes she had diagnosed me with shingles. I didn’t know much about it, other than that it was somehow related to chicken pox. But I picked up the antiviral drugs she prescribed me and came home and did a whole lot of Google research.

Shingles is herpes zoster, the reoccurrence of the chicken pox virus. After recovering from chicken pox the virus is not eradicated from your body, but rather lies dormant in the roots of your nerves. The virus can then reawaken in later life, especially if your immune system is lowered or you suffer from anxiety or stress -- which, like, *waves* -- at which point you develop shingles.

Anyway, the rash is supposed to blister and then scab and then heal, which with the help of the meds should last a week or two, and the pain, because it is nerve based, will likely last a while longer. I have to be careful with it being around and so close to my eye, because damage to the eye itself can cause permanent scarring and vision loss, which is scary, but hopefully the meds will lessen the risk of that as well.

You can’t give shingles to anyone else, but you can give chicken pox to someone who has not had chicken pox before, and because of this I have to sign myself off work until the blisters scab. Which really sucks for work, although my manager has been lovely about it, and kind of sucks for me, because I don’t fancy being house-bound for up to two weeks.

But I’ve been letting the blog slide of recent, not through depression but simply having other things to do, so perhaps it will be good to have some time with which to focus on writing again. I shouldn’t really go out, I’ve already ploughed through most of the Netflix library I can be bothered with, and the fiery pains up all the nerves of my face makes it hard to concentrate on anything too active.

So I’ll come here and let you know how I’m getting along, I’ll write whatever I have in me to write, and it’ll hopefully distract me in between doses of Zovirax and paracetamol and ibuprofen, of which I’ll be taking a whole shit-ton.

I hope you wonderful people are all good, anyway. Peace.