The Yellow World Read Free Page B

really bright, but I like it when words do their own thing, when mistakes create different sorts of ideas. We liked the name: It made us feel part of a gang, made us feel young, strong, and healthy. Sometimes labels work so well that they make you feel better.…
    In the Eggheads, just like in any gang with any pride, wehad a couple of slogans that we liked to shout: “I’ve only got one leg, but I’m not lame.” That made us feel proud of ourselves. The second-most popular: “There’s no such thing as pain.” Because we shouted it so much, threw this statement out to the world, eventually the pain itself went away.
    There is something called the pain threshold, the moment when you start to notice pain; it’s the doorway into pain, the moment when your brain thinks that something is going to make it hurt. The pain threshold is half a centimeter away from actual pain. Yes, it is possible to measure it. I think it must be because I’m an engineer that I use numbers to judge feelings, people, and pain. Sometimes I think that it’s the mixture of engineering and cancer that’s made me like this.
    So little by little, we stopped noticing pain. First of all it was the pain of the chemo injections; it always hurts when they give you an injection. But we found out that the pain came from thinking that it existed. “What if injections don’t actually hurt? What if what happens is that we react to pain like they show us in the movies without noticing if we really feel it? What if pain doesn’t actually exist?”
    All of these ideas came from the cleverest of the Eggheads. He’d had cancer since he was seven, and when he came up with this he was fifteen. For me he was and always will be a mirror in which I see myself. He pulled us together; he talked to us; you could almost say that he taught us; and certainly he could always convince us of anything.
    When I heard him say that pain could disappear if we just refused to believe it existed, I thought this was an incredibly stupid idea, and when he spoke to me about the pain threshold I didn’t understand anything.
    But one day in a chemo session (and they gave me more than eighty-three), I decided to believe what he’d told me. I looked at the needle, I looked at my skin, and I didn’t introduce the third variable. It didn’t form a part of the pain equation. I didn’t think that pain was inevitable. It was just a needle that came close to my skin, went through my skin, and took some blood. It was like being caressed, a strange, different kind of caress. Iron stroking the flesh.
    And mysteriously it happened, just like that: For the first time I didn’t notice any pain. I just felt this strange caress. That day the nurse needed to stick the needle in twelve times to find a vein, because with chemo the veins hide away and get more and more difficult to find. I didn’t complain a single time, because it was magic, almost poetic, to think about this sensation. It wasn’t pain; it was something that didn’t have a name but which didn’t resemble pain at all.
    That was the day when I discovered that
pain
is a word that has no real value; it’s just like
fear
. They’re two words that frighten you, that provoke pain and fear. But when the word doesn’t exist, the thing it tries to define doesn’t exist, either.
    I think that what this great Egghead, who gave me 60 percent of his life (the best 60 percent I’ve got), wanted to say was that the word
pain
doesn’t exist; just that, that it doesn’t exist as a word, as a concept. You have to work out what’s happening to you (like I did with the injection) and not think that it’s the same as feeling pain. You have to test it, taste it, and decide what it is that you’re feeling. I insist that often “pain” will be pleasure, “pain” will be enjoyable, “pain” will be poetic.
    In the seven years afterward that I had cancer I never felt any pain, because the majority of cancer cases (apart from 10 or 12