ode to incapacity

on not being able to do things

Ladon via Wikimedia Commons

Something I’ve learned from being sick is what it means not to be able to do things. There are naturally many things I can’t do, but they are mostly things I could do: I cannot play bridge, but I could learn. Then sometimes I’m in a state of mental distress where I just want to lie around—I feel exhausted and unable to do things—but I am not actually unable to do things and making myself get up, get out of bed, brush your teeth, etc, is all possible and even important.

Being sick is different. There’s an absolute wall and it has nothing to do with me. If I’m in a lot of pain and in bed I’m just not moving. If something is sitting on the other side of the room, I’m just not getting it. If my dog throws up slightly outside my reach, the vomit and I will simply have to live a life of peaceful co-existence.

With pancreatitis this is all somewhat accentuated by the fact that the way to deal with it is by not eating and only drinking clear liquids. People who fast as a “wellness” sort of thing often say they experience clearness of mind and in my experience that does happen but it is swiftly followed by immense stupidity.

I had a good Christmas and I got careless about what I ate, with the swift result of incurring a very mild bout of pancreatitis. (Mild enough that I didn’t need to take one of my two remaining precious hoarded pain meds.)¹ At this point it’s easy to know what to do: go to clear liquids for 24 hours, then try slightly heavier fare and retreat as necessary. Black coffee is a clear liquid, so it’s all very survivable. (They also make clear Ensure, which is disgusting, but useful.) So I’ve just been reading Nixon Agonistes in bed which might have been what I would be doing anyway. As of this writing eating oatmeal is a tolerable experience if not a one hundred percent smooth one.

Incapacity is usually regarded as a curse and I have experienced it this way, certainly. Knowing your physical well-being is dependent on taking two pills with every meal, because one of your essential organs barely works anymore, is upsetting in a way I find hard to communicate—as, after all, the real alternative is simply not having the pills. Being told by my doctor I’d have to take pancreatic enzymes forever is one of the only times since all this began in 2022² that I burst into tears and began wailing “it’s not fair.” I’m always thinking about Teddy Roosevelt curing himself of asthma by being a tough kid (did this even happen?), carrying on after getting shot. His face hovers over me in disappointment.

When I feel genuinely physically incapable, however, I experience it almost as a blessing. There simply isn’t anything else to do but wait it out. Feelings of aching exhaustion and hunger come and go and there’s nothing you can do to help. You just observe. When I am quite well I can only inconsistently attain this kind of power to feel my own desires, but if you can’t eat there is nothing else to do but feel hungry.³

Pain is different; it is, to riff off Randall Jarrell, just pain. I have tried to practice this same kind of detached observation of pain, with mixed results, but in the end I think the trouble is that pain isn’t really a desire, it’s just a scream. When I was young I read a truly terrible fantasy novel duology—so bad that even I, at the time, was reading it out of a fascinated horror at how bad it was—that featured evil incestuous twins⁴ who could create micro-voids in the world and when one of them suffered a painful accident (it involved feeling like he’d been set on fire, or maybe actually having been set on fire, the details escape me) the other found she could go into his brain and create a teeny tiny void where his ability to feel pain sat, or something like that. This is where I often end up mentally I think: actually just trying to journey to the “source” so I can shut it off through the sheer power of my massive and talented brain.

At the end of this year I think maybe I’ve reached a state of peace with how things are. (Maybe.) Sometimes I’ll just have to stop whatever I want to be doing for a few days. It is OK. There are many things in this life that are real in ways that don’t have to do with my attitude or work ethic or willpower and pancreatitis is one of them. I know what to do and how to get through it and I am blessed with sympathetic and helpful loved ones. The ghost of Teddy Roosevelt has learned to accept me.

Also one day I’ll learn how to shut off pain with my amazing brain. That’s going to happen.

1. In pop culture terms it was a bit like this:

2. reportage straight from 2022:

3. Joan Didion captures some of this in her essay “In Bed”:

Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.

That said my experience with concentrating on pain is a mixed bag.

4. As you can imagine, the pop culture prominence of a different set of evil incestuous twins (I think they’re called “Lannisters”) has more or less buried this set of books completely. But if you really want to know, here they are.