EVANESCENCE
questions the doctor asked
by Regg Canarias
Ms. Biss,
I am somehow comforted by the fact that the presence of all the measurements for our physical pain screams the absence of what can measure the pain inside. So my pain's a 9, let's say, minus 1 as an appreciation for the efforts of those who tried to measure the unmeasurable.
So what do we do? We go back to zero. Then, in this case, zero becomes an ally. It becomes a race track, a reminder that we are on a loop. That the pain only vanishes for a while, but then it speeds up to reach ten, but slows down on its way to zero. The illusion of the pain going back to zero makes the suffering somewhat tolerable.
Speaking of suffering, unlike medical doctors who measure pain from 1-10, one of the psychiatrists that I had before tried measuring my sanity by making me count from 100 going backward. The pain was zero. But when the doctor said that I had
to do it while subtracting 7 for every digit I answered, the suffering was 10.
Months have passed and I still remember how the beads of sweat caressed my cheek as I recited 100, 93, 87..., inside the Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Medicine, as if my life depended on it. What the doctors fail to focus on when they measure our pain is how long they linger. How long did it take for the pain to heal the last time it happened? It recurs, remember? We are still on a race track, we are still driving the highways of zero.
And since they don't ask that, then we come back to zero, like we always do. We kept on running around until we could no longer feel the pain or the absence of it.
So I guess that's goodbye for now.
-Regg