Title: Pain

Author: Stephanie de Montalk

In: Sport 33: Spring 2005

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, 2005

Part of: Sport

Conditions of use

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Sport 33: Spring 2005

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On my return to New Zealand in December 2003, the condition intensified. I continued to sit long hours at the computer bringing the novel I was working on—the story behind 'The Fountain at Bakhchisaray', Alexander Pushkin's poema of the impossible love of a Tatar khan for a Polish countess held captive in his Crimean harem—to first draft, waiting for the inflammation to recede as it had in the past, reminding myself that, given his prodigious output, clearly Dickens had pressed on regardless.

During February 2004, I gritted my teeth in cafés and restaurants, shifted from hip to hip during movies, excused myself early from social occasions, alluding to my ribs, or saying 'I've injured my back', aware that the concept of pelvic pain was difficult for many, and mention of ischial spine confusing.

By March the pain had escalated beyond any level at which I had known it before. It dragged and burned: a cat at the curtains, a coal smouldering; it needled like crushed glass; it radiated out and pressed down, a nonexistent weight from the area of the left ischial spine. On glorious Indian summer afternoons I lay on a sofa oblivious to the buzz of sun and cicadas, wondering why mainstream analgesics were having so little effect; how pain of this persistence and degree could be caused by a bursitis or tendonitis; how Dickens had continued to write.

Further consultations uncovered nothing. An MRI was normal. A bone scan picked up the three fractured ribs but found no sign of ischial enthesis. Wearily I decided that if I was to live with this unanswerable condition I should follow the example of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote of his recurrent respiratory illness, 'I begin to hope I may, if not at least outlive this wolverine upon my shoulders, carry him bravely like Symonds and Alexander Pope.'

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John Symonds had lived his life around tubercular symptoms. Pope, with a curvature of the spine, had failed to grow and suffered life-long headaches and a heightened sensitivity to pain. These men had sought refuge in writing. Could chronic pain be an incentive for me to do the same? Perhaps this was to be the effect of the fall and the ribs were merely collateral damage.

But the pain was too consuming. Moreover, Stevenson's burden had revived memories of John Bunyan, and Pilgrim's obstinate progress. The book—a Christmas present when I was nine—awakened, in vivid illustration, Pilgrim in a dusty blue tunic with a water flask, staff, and a creeping shape on his shoulders, weeping and trembling, crying, 'What shall I do?' It also recalled, in 'the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey and safe arrival at the desired country', a story more concerned with the shedding of his oppression than its management.

I pushed the metaphysical direction to write aside. Aristotle had said, 'The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.' I needed to regain control, keep making decisions. These were medically enlightened times. Why sit blindly, albeit bravely, trying to write and hoping to get better?