TABOO OF PHYSICAL PAIN

By Carsten Graff

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After an accident, I was paralyzed from the neck down. I had no doubts that my life was over. This is the story of how I regained my mobility and learned to listen to pain and use it constructively.

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Throughout my life, I have had several serious crashes with my car and my motorbike. Despite having fallen hundreds of times while skiing, windsurfing, or doing acrobatics, I have never been hospitalized or severely injured. When on a trip to Spain five years ago, I let myself be pulled after a powerful speedboat on a so-called aqua rocket, I had not considered any danger. At some point, the boat reached a dizzying speed, and when we hit a big wave, I was thrown high into the air. When landing headfirst in the water, it felt like knocking my head against a rock, before everything went black.

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When I came to myself, I was a few meters underwater, but could see the sun flashing on the surface of the water above my head. Instinctively, I tried to swim upwards, but my body didn’t react. Instead, I let the life jacket pull me up until a moment later, I reached the surface. Here I lay floating with a strong ringing in my ears while hearing the speedboat returning to pick me up. When trying to turn my head in the direction of the boat, I was once more reminded that I had lost control over my body. None of my muscles reacted, and only now did I become fully aware that I was just a head floating on top of the water. From my neck down, I could feel nothing, and with horror, I realized that I was paralyzed. While I was trying to comprehend this new reality, the speedboat stopped in front of me. The man in the boat waved and laughed, but I couldn’t wave back. When I tried to shout, I realized that I had also lost my voice and could only whisper.

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The existential shift
When the man in the boat learned what had happened, we agreed not to try to pull me into the boat. With a broken neck, it was best that I stay in the water to avoid further neck fractures. Instead, he found his phone and called the Coast Guard for help. Around an hour later, a team of helpers arrived in a motorboat and got a stretcher into the water. Once I was attached to the stretcher, we headed for land. When reaching the beach, an ambulance was waiting for me, and a moment later, I was on my way to a nearby hospital.

While driving with the siren blaring, I was alone in the back of the ambulance with my head clamped between two foam blocks. A few years earlier, I had worked at a school for people with severe handicaps and knew all too well what awaited me. For the rest of my life, I would be sitting in an electric wheelchair that I could maneuver with my chin. Each day, I would be surrounded by professionals who would feed me, wash me, and change my diaper. Day by day, my body would weaken until it gave up and, in the end, I would die an agonizing and slow death. While considering the nightmare ahead of me, I also felt an inexplicable euphoria. In a split second, my freedom had been taken away from me, and for the first time in my life, I was totally helpless. This was naturally a gigantic existential shift, but even though tears were running from my eyes, I not only felt sadness. For some inexplicable reason, I was also in a surreal state of relief. Somehow, the shock had made me let go of my façade, and whatever emotion came, it was amplified a thousand times. For reasons I did not understand, the situation seemed meaningful, and if — at that moment — I could have gone back and avoided the accident, I wouldn’t have done it. The accident was important and something I deserved. Why I felt this way was a mystery, and on the trip to the hospital, I lay pondering this question while alternately laughing and crying.

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Thoughts of suicide
At the hospital, I was put in a bed and driven up and down some long corridors, and since no one spoke English, I had no idea what was going to happen. At some point, I realized that one of the lifeguards had put my cell phone in the ambulance. Lying somewhere beside me in the bed, it started ringing, but I naturally couldn’t move my hands to pick it up. A moment later, two nurses appeared, and while studying me, they spoke rapidly in Spanish. First, they put a protective collar around my neck before cutting off my swimming trunks. While they diapered me, a man who was lying just beside me started screaming at the top of his lungs. It sounded as if he was subjected to cruel torture, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t turn my head to see what was going on. A few hours later, I had my neck scanned and was put in a large room with curtains around the bed. Here I was left alone with my chaotic thoughts. Most of the time, I was trying to figure out how to commit suicide. It would surely not be easy to convince anyone to take me out of my misery by putting a plastic bag over my head.

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My encounter with the pain
After more than 24 hours in the hospital, it suddenly felt as if my body started waking up. At first, I had flashes of extreme pain exploding in my arms, and next, my legs and arms began shaking. As I was shaking, it felt as if my hands and feet were frozen, and at the same time, I was able to move my fingers and toes a little. During the next few hours, both the pain and my mobility increased. Soon, it felt as if someone was pouring boiling water on the skin of both my arms. The pain was so excruciating that a nurse noticed that I was struggling and gave me a drop that presumably contained some sort of painkiller. Although the pain was a sign that I was not fully paralyzed, I still had no idea how to interpret the symptoms. Perhaps I would only be 90% paralyzed and would have to live in a hell of pain for the rest of my life.

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Walking dead
As the pain relentlessly continued to burn my skin, my phone once more started ringing. This time, a nurse came over and put it in my hand. I could sense the phone in my hand but didn’t have the strength to unlock it. For several hours, I concentrated on the phone while gaining more sensitivity in my body. Finally, I managed to unlock the phone, and with all my strength, I managed to get up on one side and take a selfie. Soon after, a doctor who spoke English appeared. At first, he looked in my journal before telling me that my neck was not broken.

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“We need the bed for someone else,” the doctor continued nonchalantly. “You can go home now.”

 

“But I can hardly move,” I explained, “and I am in extreme pain and totally naked.”

 

“You’ll get some hospital clothes,” he explained, “but I have to ask you to leave as soon as you are dressed.”

 

After the conversation, two porters helped me get dressed, after which they carried me from the bed into a wheelchair and pushed me into the reception area. Here I sat while being in excruciating pain. No matter how much I tried to push the wheels of the chair in the direction of the exit, I couldn't do it. To get help, I looked at my phone and realized that it would be out of battery in a few minutes. I had no money, no credit card, and couldn’t remember where I lived.

The story of how I managed to get back to my hotel is very long, but with the help of a lot of caring and understanding people, I found my way. After that, I lay in the hotel for a week on a sofa while watching several seasons of a series that clearly pictured how I felt — the series was called “The Walking Dead.”

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Starting all over
When about 2 weeks later I was back home, I could walk a few hundred meters but had almost no strength in my arms. From being able to do 30 push-ups, I could not do a single one — not even with my knees touching the ground. If taking a shower, it would feel like being showered with shards of glass, or if sitting or lying down, it would take me forever to get up again. I couldn’t tie my shoes, couldn’t write, and getting dressed took half an hour, but I could manage the basics and didn’t need helpers. All the muscles in my body were like jelly, and in the following months, I went through a challenging process where everything I had previously been able to do had to be relearned. In this period, I lost many kilos while several of my muscles decreased dramatically in size, leaving the skin more and more saggy. Each day, I spend many hours trying to relearn how to walk, sit, move my hands, write on a keyboard, play the guitar, and a multitude of other things. After three months, I went to a public swimming bath to try to swim and was close to a panic attack when getting myself into the water.

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Pain as my guide
After consulting several experts, they could offer me nothing but painkillers. Even though the pain was still excruciating, I didn’t feel like taking medication. The pain naturally made my life a constant hell, but at the same time, the pain was my only compass. If I sedated my pain, I would not sense my progress and could not hear what my body was telling me. Of course, this was not the first time I had been in pain, but I had never had such strong pain and never for such a long time. Being in constant pain made me realize that pain was not something my body created to make my life miserable. The pain was a guide telling me what I should and shouldn’t do and which areas of my body needed special care and attention. Without pain, I would be lost and might easily create more damage than good when trying to regain my strength.

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The language of pain
Having so much pain and basically no energy, there were not a lot of things I could do. Therefore, I spent most of my time lying in my bed communicating with my pain. When the pain kept me awake at night or when it attacked me during the day, I did what I could to understand and interpret what it was telling me. Sometimes the pain would haunt me for a whole day or two, and other times for a few hours before it left me again. When I left my home to walk, I was regularly overcome by pain so severe that I felt nauseous and had to move slowly and carefully to avoid passing out. There were days when I lost patience and cursed the pain, but also days when I managed to embrace it and appreciate its existence. Whenever I managed to appreciate my pain, it usually left me for some time. In this way, I understood that my pain was like a living person who — like everyone else — wanted to be understood, listened to, accepted and respected.

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The miracle of returning to life
Today, several years have passed since the accident, and I still have days when the pain in my arms is killing me or when my legs suddenly collapse under me. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and my hands or feet are sleeping, but when I get out of bed, my body wakes up. Despite still suffering from the accident, I can now again do 30 push-ups, do acrobatics, juggle, play the guitar, swim, run, and walk as far as I want to. This is naturally nothing less than a miracle. In certain ways, I’m in even better shape than before the accident. Today, I have no doubts that it would not have played out this way if I had numbed my pain and spent my energy being angry while regretting my carelessness. Despite all the suffering, I still have not wished to be able to go back and avoid the accident. The accident and the following pain have taught me what it means to be helpless and what it means to lose my physical freedom while spending my time expanding my emotional freedom. The accident forced me to let go of all forms of control, and afterward it taught me to slow down, recognize my earthly vulnerability, and see my pain as a helping friend. Without the accident, I would not have had the opportunity to learn these things and would not be able to appreciate the immeasurable value of the small things in life that I, for many years, had taken for granted. Like the miracle of sensing the soothing hot sun on my skin, cooking my favorite meal, swimming in a cold lake, receiving a massage, or going for a walk in the forest whenever I want.

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