Dr. Metablog

Miss Dusenberry

Miss Dusenberry, an English teacher at Erasmus Hall High School, was a formidable presence.

It was 1954 or 1955 and I was a junior, carrying just sixteen years of experience on my skinny back. To my shy, inhibited self, Miss Dusenberry (Edna? Grace?) was perceived as ancient (50s), statuesque (5' 10"), domineering (she spoke authoritatively on all things literary) and wildly eccentric. She wore fragrant cosmetics and bedecked herself with so many bracelets and bangles that, striding imperiously around the room, she jingled atonally and constantly.

My schoolwork did not please her. Miss Dusenberry derailed my educational career, demoting me from the honors track in English (where the bright students were grouped and where lessons were taught) to the general track where classrooms were disorderly, students ranged from noncompliant to sociopathic, and it was assumed that nothing would be learned, and it wasn't.

Yesterday, on an odd nostalgic impulse, I re-read Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown for the first time in close to sixty years. The story is more shocking to me now than it could possibly have been in the 50s, when I had no background to understand puritanism or the manichean view of the world. The story is more alarming in what it takes for granted about American culture than for what it consciously critiques. Hawthorne's world is not and never has been, my America. 

Not only was I distressed by the story, but my mind flew back, or regressed, to Miss Dusenberry herself, who tried to present the story to unsophisticated, un-empathetic me back there in the Duke Snider/Joe McCarthy/Sid Caesar era. No wonder that I flopped in Miss D's class. Good grief, was I ever unwordly/unPuritan! On my intellectual horizon, the big worry was whether Roy or Gil might go hitless two days in a row. I had not the merest tad of experience (or even reading) to bring to bear on the elucidation of a dark allegorical treatment of severe Calvinist soul-sickness. Didn't, for that matter, know what Christians were talking about, except that the women and the kids dressed up and went to mass on Sundays (in our Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrant neighborhood, men stayed home and washed the car). There were no devils, real, imaginary, or allegorical in my deep, mysterious forests -- and no forests either, in concrete Brooklyn. I had no concept of spiritual despair or sin or damnation or salvation or any such things -- still don't in fact -- not in any personal way. 

Anyway, back in Erasmus Hall, Miss Dusenberry led the class through some stories by Hawthorne. We might even have read The House of Seven Gables -- that other novel, the one with the A-word, would have been far too sexual and embarrassing. Then came the unit exam and that's when the allegorical world of Calvinism hit the fan of naive Flatbush literalism. The topic on which we were assigned to write an in-class essay was -- "Is there balm in Gilead?"

I got to tell you, I was buffaloed. 

It's easy to look back now, sixty years later, and translate Miss Dusenberry's question into "in Hawthorne's view, is there hope for spiritual redemption in a fallen universe?" An invitation, I must say, to turn the bullshittery up to eleven. But I didn't know the word "balm" and I had never heard of "Gilead." I didn't know the hymn and I most certainly didn't know that there was any such thing as a Book of Jeremiah which contained relevant dark sentences to be interpreted allegorically or mystically.

So I failed, ignominiously. Not the worst failure of my childhood -- being thrown out at home plate when I had been sent in as a pinch-runner was a far greater ignominy. But to tell truth, I've never made my peace with Miss Dusenberry. Her bangles occasionally rattle my sleep.

Hawthorne? well, I've just kind of set him to one side.  

On Pain

Regular readers of this blague have got to be wondering -- where have you gone, Dr. Metablog? A hungry readership turns their lonely eyes to you (woo woo woo}. We're missing your pithy and astute commentary. All these athletic contests come and gone, even including the World Cup, and all those political follies, and not a word of commentary?  How can it be, Dr. M? Cat got your tongue? 

Well, dear blogreaders, the fact of the matter is that Dr. M. has been sidelined with an injury and has been languishing on the disabled list. Ruptured his disc, he did. L5 if you want to be specific. On his back now these last two weeks, gulping the oxycodone, enduring a series of trips down there to the regional hospital. Dependent on family and friends for succor and sustenance

Lying here, solitary for longer periods than is his wont, Dr. M,, who never had a mind for philosophy, has had an opportunity to meditate on a subject of particular relevance to his condition. He's been thinking about pain. About dealing with pain.

Sometimes even Dr. M has to deal with very practical problems.

At the hospital, various "providers" ask me, over and over again, to "put a number from 1 to 10 on the degree of your discomfort."  "Imagine," they say, that 10 is the worst pain that you can conceive, what is your number?" For me, this becomes a very difficult question, and one to which I don't know how to respond honestly or accurately. For one thing,  I have a rather vivid imagination, and for another, I've read more than is healthy about ingenious systems of medieval and "renaissance" torture. It's true that my back hurts, and the pain is real, but it's nothing compared to the worst that human beings have endured or can be compelled to endure. I'm sorry to say that I can imagine pain an order of magnitude beyond what my questioner can begin to conceptualize. 

But if I should say, "one" on a scale of one to ten, they'd throw me out of the hospital and give my place to a more deserving patient. So I say, "eight and a half" or "nine" -- not because such a number has the least bit of meaning but because I think I've given my interrogators the magic number that will allow me to get the care I need.  

I have a friend who had a very painful form of arthritis, but couldn't get the attention of the medical establishment for many horrible months -- until he answered the pain question with "I'm going to go out in the backyard and shoot myself." Then he was diagnosed and put on medication in an hour.

Moreover, I don't know how to measure my pain against another's. My eight might be someone else's five, or vice versa. I don't want to be theatrical (I can't bear to be a spectacle), but I also have no desire to be excessively stoical. A ruptured disc hurts. Ask anyone who's been there. Is it equivalent to childbirth? I suspect not. I know that burns are supposed to be infinitely more agonizing. I got to the point of wincing and moaning and feeling faint, but not to fainting or writhing or screaming. And I could always get relief from oxycodone, which is not always the case in more serious situations. I even had some morphine, which, at the time, was surprisingly ineffective. Now I'm on the road to recovery, I believe, and the pain is very much handled with those horse-size ibuprofen. But ten days ago it was all narcotics, all the time. And I was grateful for them. Very much so.

I am reminded once again that pain is isolating. It separates you from your friends. You live in the pain, and with the pain, and you deal with the pain. You can't communicate it and you don't want to communicate it.

I fault myself for not having been sufficiently empathetic during my lifetime to the pain that other people have experienced.   

While I've been lying here, I've read two books by daring people who do not hesitate to court pain. The kind of person who decides to climb an unclimbable mountain, break his leg and then drags himself miles, freezing, starving, crippled. The kind of person who leaves warm hearth and happy home to walk to the South Pole dragging a two hundred kilogram sledge. These folks endure all sorts of horrors, voluntarily. Then they write books about their pain (whole paragraphs which I involuntarily skim and skip). When I read these stories, I feel like a wimp to complain about a ruptured disc. On the other hand, I feel sane -- not to have deliberately injured myself for the sake of some wild, inexplicable impulse.

An Unsettling Anecdote

There's an article in the current Harvard Magazine on the subject of caregiving. (I've been thinking about caregiving quite a bit the last while, because I've been the recipient of a lot of it, having been bedridden for a couple of weeks with a slipped, or herniated, or ruptured disc). Taking care of me has been a chore, performed with great grace and generosity by Mrs. Dr. M, by Dr. M's oldest son, and by his son's wonderful wife. 

The article on caregiving begins with a striking, unsettling anecdote. 

In 1966, as a visiting medical student at a London teaching hospital, I interviewed a husband and wife, in their early twenties, who had recently experienced a truly calamitous health catastrophe. On their wedding night, in their first experience of sexual intercourse, a malformed blood vessel in the husband’s brain burst, leaving him with a disabling paralysis of the right side of his body. Stunned and guilt-ridden, the couple clutched hands and cried silently as they shared their suffering with me. My job was to get the neurological examination right and diagnose where the rupture had taken place.

The author's point is that a diagnosis is incomplete in the absence of compassion, not only in this most dramatic case but in more ordinary occasions.  

It has been difficult for me to keep my mind off this traumatized young couple --- stepping enthusiastically and it would appear naively into a first adventure in sexual expression only to be overwhelmed by an out-of-the-blue horror. It's a sorrow beyond ordinary sorrow. I wish that the author had added a paragraph in which he reported that the young man recovered, that surgery corrected the defect, and that the couple went on to live a long and satisfying life. I fear that the absence of such a report means that there was no good news. Starting with an aneurysm in the brain, it's easy to descend into scenarios of doom.

Ah life! So many potential disasters out there, so many bullets to dodge.

Even while I'm lying here, unable to get around without pain, I know that I've lived a most fortunate life. No intercourse-related aneurysms, for one thing.