Let's Talk about Pain

Pain Scale. Google Images

My earliest memory of pain and the first time I played in snow both occurred on the same day. I was eight years old and it was an ordinary Saturday; I woke up and started to clean up my room. I looked out the window and saw white fluff falling from the sky. It took a minute for me to register that what I was seeing was snow, not fluff. I finish my chores and bundled up to play in the snow. As a recent immigrant from Jamaica I was bundled up like the Michelin Man; being a child I removed my gloves. Needless to say after half an hour I could no longer feel my finger but the joy of having my first snow fight and making my first snow angel was more important. An hour later, I went inside and sat in front of the heater, as my fingers warmed up I experienced excruciating pain. I cried out and my aunt kept asking me “What is wrong?” all I could reply was “It hurts.” I like many others have no words to express pain; we also have trouble talking about pain. Audre Lorde is one of few who can articulate pain.

Lorde writes in The Cancer Journals “I want to write about pain…of going in and out of pain…I want to write of the pain I am feeling right now…” (Lorde 23). Lorde writes in 1978 after the mastectomy of her breast to combat breast cancer. Forty-eight years earlier Virginia Woolf, who was afflicted with bipolar disorder wrote about illness in her work On Being Ill, and the lack of vocabulary to describe illness and the pain that inevitably comes with illness. Both Lorde and Woolf had a way with words. Both experience their illness and pain differently but both used their gift with words to articulate for others the lack of language we have surrounding pain and the culture around not expressing our pain. 

As a breast cancer survivor when she wrote The Cancer Journals, Lorde experienced her illness in a world where women with breast cancer were and still are considered "warriors." (Lorde 62) Applying war as the metaphor for the battle against breast cancer, also applies the characteristics of a warrior onto women who have breast cancer. A warrior as defined by google is "a brave or experienced solider or fighter." A solider or a fighter has no room to not be brave, to show fear or express their pain. They are to be tough, emotionless, protectors and role models that everyone can look up to. When the term warrior is applied to women with breast cancer we are essentially telling these women that they cannot be human, they cannot show their vulnerability at their most vulnerable time; a time where they need the support of their friends and loved ones. Instead they are the one who has to protect the feelings of their loved ones and not be the cancer patient who needs sympathy. 

Barbara Ehrenreich's Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch, explores the path a cancer patient is not only put on but expected to follow once they receive their positive diagnosis. Like Lorde who woke up in a cold recovery room after her mastectomy, Ehrenreich experienced the being left in an exam room while doctors and pathologist study her mammogram scan, and retook scans without giving her any information. (Enhrenreich 43)  Critiques of the happy go lucky image breast cancer patients are supposed to have at all times, is few and far in between. Lorde and Ehrenreich are critical of the lack of support and space for breast cancer patients to truly express the full range of their emotions: the anger, frustration, sadness and pain (both emotional and physical).

“…Breast cancer was a dread secret, endured in silence and euphemized in obituaries as a “long illness.” Something about the conjuncture of “breast,” signifying sexuality and nurturance, and that other word, suggesting the claws of a devouring crustacean, spooked almost everyone.” (Ehrenreich 45) The secrecy, surrounding breast cancer and the need for women who have had a mastectomy like Lorde to use prosthesis to “look normal and natural,” is part of the reason women who suffer from cancer cannot talk about their experiences with the emotional, mental and physical trauma and pain that comes with a cancer prognosis. (Lorde 71) The culture of silence around the experiences of cancer patients breeds an environment in which women are no longer themselves but their illness as Ehrenreich wrote “Where I once was—not a commanding presence perhaps but nonetheless a standard assemblage of flesh and words and gesture—‘there is a cancer.’ I have been replaced by it, is the surgeon’s implication. This is what I am now, medically speaking.” (Ehrenreich 44)

To be sure, the experiences of cancer patients are not all the same, nor will they ever be.  Audre Lorde’s experience with cancer as a Black Lesbian Feminist will never be the same as Barbara Ehrenreich’s, who is a white woman. The lack of language and opportunity cancer patients have in expressing their pain can be chalked up to “they didn’t say anything”, however, to do this is a grave injustice to not only patients but to everyone in general, because an environment is created in which we cannot discuss the most basic of human interactions: our feelings. Joanna Brouke wrote in “How to Talk about Pain” that “…pain was emptied of positive value. Rather than being passively endured, pain became an “enemy” to be fought and ultimately defeated.” (Brouke) The establishment of pain as the enemy also establishes people who talk of their pain as the enemy because they are seen as complainers, this is the society in which we are living.

In conclusion, we need to value emotions; valuing all emotions, and embracing the fact people do experience pain and need language to describe how they are experiencing their pain we can do justice not just for cancer patients but to create a healthier society in which all emotions are valued.

Work Cited

Brouke, Joanna. “How to Talk about Pain”

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2001. "Welcome to Cancerland." Harper's Magazine, November 1, 43.

Lorde, Audre. 1980. Theœ Cancer Journals. 2. ed. ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Woolf, Virginia. 2002. On being Ill. Ashfield, Mass: Paris Press.