the art of letting go

six - the fight

the art of the fight

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One of the first things I learnt in Medical School was pain classification. You can treat patients based on pain severity. Some people experience mild pain; treatable by something like aspirin or ibuprofen. Moderate pain tends to be partnered with mild opioids, such as codeine. Severe pain, the highest on the scale, tends to require the most addictive medications. Morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone. People crave pain relief like we crave happiness. A lot of my fellow students often commented on how insane it was that people became addicted to these things, chasing the relief like one would a dog. I never found myself questioning it. I guess a part of me understood.

I've never been a stranger to pain. Headaches, general pain that came with a mild illness, bruises. The sort of pain that you know will fade with time. Some pain never truly disappears. Some of the scars marring my skin still itched from time to time, as if they were still healing, as if I required a reminder of how it felt to have my skin ripped open to accommodate some man's wrath.

Chronic pain is long term. It doesn't tend to fade with time. Some patients spend their entire lives on medications just to dim it slightly, for some shred of normality. One thing that always interested me, however, was phantom pain.

Phantom pain is classified as a pain that appears to be coming from a body part that's no longer there. A post-amputation phenomenon that has triggered an intense debate over whether the pain was purely psychological or not. It isn't. Researchers have found out the reasons for the pain but that still can't explain how people feel like it's still there, without the pain. To some people who lose a limb, it's like the loss never occurred mentally at all. Phantom limb sensation - the perception that the removed limb is still there entirely.

I've witnessed pain in it's harshest form. When cancer ripped through my first grade teacher, I watched a woman that radiated sunlight burn away into someone unrecognisable. Mom's boyfriends tended to dip into sadism too. Enjoyed beating her around when she was too gone to fight back, and then turning on me when her neck would limp like a broken bird and ruin their fun. It never bothered me when they rounded on me though, only when they hurt her. That was always the hardest part. When you're little, you can hide or put your head down. You can ignore the shouting, the crying, and pretend like you're not even there. I learnt that quickly with my Mom, how to just clear my mind and breathe until my surroundings were as quiet as my mind.

As I got older, I felt more responsible. I wasn't a child anymore; I couldn't just shut off my thoughts and go someplace else. It was blunt, and it was callous, and it was real. No shred of denial could've worked. You feel like you should be able to stop it, guilty for being the one who isn't being hurt. When one of my foster parents started beating on the other, I felt like I should've been doing something. Something to protect her, to stop him.

I spent a lot more time then I'm willing to admit looking back on times like that. Times where I was entirely helpless, where I couldn't do anything but wait for it to end. I've spent years getting angry at myself for not doing enough, so I swore that I'd do something to help.

I wasn't becoming a doctor to save the world. That wasn't even a part of it. I wasn't studying to pass the exam, but to get to a point where I am the only thing between a person and a gravestone. To help all those souls who need it. To make a difference. To help save people that I never got the opportunity to save before.

The world is incredibly massive. Seven billion people populate this planet, saving them all is impossible.

But not many people realize that we don't just live in one world. There are seven billion people on Earth, each with their own world and their own orbit and their own destiny. So I might not ever be able to save the world, but I could save someone's.