Paingod

After I had my staging surgery for my suspected lymphoma, in the recovery area I asked the anesthetist about how my depth of anesthesia was monitored. I was curious because I remember awakening during the procedure. It wasn't painful, despite my abdomen being open, but I do remember the OR personnel talking.

"We call that 'recall,'" she responded. "We monitor processed EEG waves, frontal lobe activity that quasi-linearizes balances between GABA and an index value that documents your sedation. Above a certain number, it assures deep-enough sedation."

"Oh," I said. She knew I was a neuro-researcher, so she assumed I understood.

I did:

They monitor the brain's inhibition—or, sedation—via the balance of a neurotransmitter, gamma-aminobutyric acid, and go by its bispectral index. Gama-aminobutyric acid, aka "GABA."

Cool.

It was also cool that the splenectomy went as planned, which was part of the procedure. What wasn't cool was the abdominal pain I was experiencing in the PACU. For that, they played my GABA against my glutamate, the other amino acid which, alternatively, is excitatory and spikes to embellish pain.

And pain hurts: EEG waveform morphology, spectral analysis, burst suppression, and alpha power. Pain hurts, which is not cool.

"A bispectral index of zero is brain dead," she added. "90-100 is wide awake. For your appendectomy, you were at '45'—perfect general anesthesia."

Very cool.

"Can I borrow this monitor one day?" I asked.

She knew of my research for Big Pharma where I was searching for the perfect pain-killer—effective, without tolerance, dependence, or addiction. For me, the research was personal, suffering from chronic, debilitating pain, for which I had to choose either suffering or opioid adverse effects. In my research, however, I had to remain clear-headed.

"Sure," she said. "Will you put me on your paper?"

"You got it!" This was a good deal: adding her at the end of the list of authors, all whose names began with me. And on the win-win side, it's always a nice feather in any academician's hat.

In my lab lived a glob of neurologic stem cells, no easy feat in today's pro-life environment. It had wires jabbed here and there, monitoring the waveforms of a rudimentary human brain. One with gaps, sure, but gaps I didn't really need. After all, I didn't need it to do algebra or write poetry. And I didn't need to talk with it.

We all knew which wire evoked pain.

Pain. That was funny, looking at my little glob.

Pain is a subjective awareness of unpleasantness. Extrapolated, it hurts. Turn it to 10—it becomes agony. We'd go to 11 if we could! All for Big Pharma.

After I had borrowed the anesthetist's monitor and wired it into the glob of cells related to awareness—

Perhaps "awareness" was an incorrect word. But that was the whole point of measuring, besides the inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters, anything else that might move the needle on the meter somewhere between 0 and 100. If pain were subjective, then subjective awareness is what suffers. Otherwise, a burn on the flesh, for a person, would be no more an impression than burning a piece of wood is to the wood.

I realized that I was doing more than measuring neurochemical concentrations. Might I be measuring suffering? And if so, did it really count with a blob of cells wired so primitively?

Was such an awareness a sentience that was even there? And did I care? This was not a person; it was mere biochemistry. At an existential level, it didn't even matter.

I provoked its pain and watched.

The bispectral index went to 97. It was suffering. But could it be awake? That is, was it aware-awake? Who could know? It wouldn't tell me.

No, there would be no letter of complaint or suing for damages, I laughed to myself.

I turned it up. While the bispectal index only went to 100%, I had unlimited amperage at my disposal for rendering pain; and while there was no value assigned on an analog pain scale, it hinted at some rudimentary awareness by which to measure subjective pain.

The bispectral index bounced from 40-100%, often over seconds. But whereas I tortured the poor glob for months, I never found any magic pill or miracle analgesic formulation from my research. I wrote my paper anyway, but it was rejected, as expected. I often think about the pain I inflicted, but my little guy is long gone now, the failed experiment dismantled and thrown out in a biohazard bag, sitting somewhere in a medical waste landfill.

It's gone—its pain a thing of the past, like it never happened. Like I was never the pain-god. My conscience was clear.

Meanwhile, my cancer pain continueds. I'm hopeful for a discovery, because my pain matters. I suffer, and that's important. Am I brave? What about when I'm gone?

Would it be like it never happened because it's no longer happening? Was my little glob of neural tissue brave?

"He's in a better place now," it was said at my funeral. "His suffering is over."

What an empty consolation!

Does pain at any time matter just because it will be gone at some point? Did suffering even matter? Does the passage of time mean it was like it never happened? Like I was never here? Or does suffering remain a part of our being, even when it's over? That is, is it ever over? C.S. Lewis said we are all immortals.

Somewhere, ol' C.S. is squirming.

In any afterlife belief, eternity doesn't mean forever, but outside of time; that is, all time's events still remain as "a thing" outside of these linear temporal cross-sections through which we lived our 3-D lives as blobs or otherwise.

So, does existence mean only now? If there's nothing after, did we even matter, like we never were at all? Did what we experience, love, suffer, or thrill add to some summation that sits elsewhere outside of our linearity? — and is still a part of us? ...somewhere? Or, once we're gone, is it like we were never here? Like my little glob of gelatin who suffered so.

Hoping to one day end up in a better place is not much consolation for a person while they're in pain. Where does the suffering go? When it's passed, it doesn't mean it's undone. Now that I'm dead and gone, in eternity, am I really in a better place, or can I choose to have never mattered?