Feeling no pain

Nils Ling

This past week, my wife went in for carpal tunnel surgery.

Carpal tunnel syndrome is a narrowing of the main nerve passage in your wrist, which puts pressure on the nerves and causes you to elbow your husband several times a night to send him off to get you another ice pack. It also causes fairly intense complaining and occasional flashes of outright anger when people are less sensitive than you’d like them to be.

From what I could tell, it was painful for her as well.

Carpal tunnel operations used to be a huge deal, but now they have it down to day surgery under local anaesthetic. I took her in first thing in the morning, and she was done in just over an hour.

The surgery itself took mere minutes. The rest of the time was given over to administering the freezing and waiting for it to set in solidly and thoroughly. (By the way “remember that.)

She emerged from the operating room cheerful and pain-free for the first time in years. She marvelled at modern medicine: “It’s amazing. I went in with pain and now ... nothing!”

I reminded her that they had spent the bulk of her time in that room making sure she felt “nothing”, and with good reason:They were cutting her open.Many of your most successful operations happen because the patient is anaesthetised and can’t feel the scalpel slicing through their skin and tissues and ligaments, and is therefore far less likely to leap up with a howl of indignation and deck the surgeon. It’s one of the first things they learn in doctor school, right after the Hippocratic Oath ('Do not allow hippos in the operating room').

Still, my wife was cheerful and upbeat. She rolled her eyes when I insisted we stop at a pharmacy and fill the prescription for pain medicine. “Waste of time,” she said. “This is a piece of cake.” But we stopped anyway.

Now, I don’t know much about surgery, but I do know pain. And I am especially familiar with hand pain, having not long ago had an unfortunate encounter with a clearly defective hatchet while chopping kindling for my woodstove. I was holding a piece of wood and brought the hatchet down, and “it being substandard “the blade did not so much hit the stick of kindling as my thumb. There was pain.

What I know about that kind of pain is this: when it arrives, it does not creep in on little cat feet. Hand pain is that obnoxious guest who bursts in without knocking, throws its bags in the corner, flops down on the couch, makes a grab for the remote, and demands a beer. You know you’re in for a long, unpleasant visit.

Which is why the doctors give you a little slip of paper which you can take to a pharmacy and exchange for a tiny bottle filled with “Get Out Of Jail Free!” cards.

When I performed my impromptu hatchet surgery, my wife was less than sympathetic. She would snap the childproof cap off the painkillers and dole them out sparingly, with a little disapproving face and a fewtsk tsksand some mention that I was possibly just a “... little bit of a wuss”. There was also some eye-rolling.

So while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was looking forward to the freezing coming out of her hand, I did find a tiny degree of satisfaction in having the opportunity to relax in a chair, munch on popcorn, and watch as karma snuck up behind her and applied a well-placed boot.

“Hmm,” she said, as the freezing began to fade. Then, “Hey ... this kinda stings.” I suggested she might want to take her pills now, because the lag between the time you pop them and the time they get to work is about a half hour.

“Well, maybe I'll take one, for now.” (Silly, silly, silly. If it says “Take two”, you never go for fewer.) So she took one, no doubt feeling far superior to her wuss of a husband.

Within fifteen minutes, she was washing down the second pill and peering at the label. “Four hours? I have to waitfour hours? Are you kidding me? I think these are defective pills. They’re not doinganything! How much time has it been? Is it four hours yet?”

I reminded her of how unsympathetic she had been when it was my hand that was hurting. She reminded me that we still owned the hatchet and she still had one good hand. We reached an accord on the whole sympathy issue.

Never argue with a woman when she has a hatchet and a sore hand. That’s another thing they teach you in doctor school.

This feature: From Nils Ling’s book Truths and Half Truths. A collection of some of his most memorable and hilarious columns.