Writing About Pain

So, today I went to the dentist. I’m currently in the middle of having my teeth straightened with braces – fairly unusual, for me being 24, I know, but there was no spare $7,000 lying around when I was younger – and a lot of it hurt. A lot more of it was seriously uncomfortable, and it’s not the pain that bothers me so much as the sensation of my teeth being pressed on forcefully. Not to brag or anything, but, I can handle pain.

My liver, again, not to brag or anything, is to normal livers what Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is to normal people. It metabolises things so fast that caffeine and nicotine have no effect on me whatsoever, I could sober up from however many drinks I’d had (back when I used to drink) in about ten minutes, and, more unfortunately, local anaesthetic basically doesn’t work on me at all. Not only does this make me terrified about how possibly ineffective general anaesthetic might be if I ever need emergency surgery, but it also means that the two surgeries I have had done recently were pretty much un-anaesthetised.

The first of these was getting my wisdom teeth removed (which, yes, can be done under just local if you can’t afford an operating theatre and an anaesthetist for the general), and the second was some excess teeth to create room for the braces because my jaws were crowded. It was highly unpleasant both times, but it has rather put most other unpleasant things in my life into perspective. Everyday orthodontic visits like this one are a piece of cake compared to having people digging around in my gums with needles and scalpels.

What occurs to me, however, is this: pain is a very personal thing. When we see a character in a movie or read a character in a book experiencing pain, we imagine our own pain, the pain that we know, because we can’t ever really know how someone else’s brain or nerves reacts to certain things. We can feel phantom pains in limbs that no longer exist, or feel sympathetic pain when someone we know describes something they’ve been through.

My current story being a fantasy book that involves fighting things, people are inevitably (spoilers, I guess) going to get hurt at certain points. And I find myself wondering if my perception of pain is so different from normal people’s as to create some kind of divide between what everyone else will think is an appropriate amount of pain for someone to be able to push through, and what I do. I have it on good authority from literally everybody I’ve told about my surgeries that a lot of people can’t even stand to imagine going through them the way I did, without any really numbing, though of course I am not one to presume there aren’t a lot of people with a pain tolerance as high as mine.

But that makes it even more interesting, in my opinion.

Does everyone who writes anything inextricably describe their own experiences of pain in their writing, or can some people find a more generic way to express it? Can we ever accurately convey that description of our own sensations, or does every reader invariably imagine their own experiences of pain, unable to extract such a primal feeling from our own visceral knowledge of it?

I feel like I should go back and re-read something where a character experiences pain, and analyse my reactions to find out whether I rationalise what happens into my own knowledge of pain, or accept the description however it may differ from what I experience.

Like love, there are many ways to interpret pain, but unlike love, pain can never really be shared with anyone else. Perhaps that is why I’ve never particularly thought about it like this before. It’s disconcerting to realise that, in one aspect at least, all of my characters may be clones of myself, exhibiting something personal to me.

But then I wonder whether anyone even notices…