Those with eyes to see

I went for a checkup at the pain center today. I told Bernadette, my nurse practitioner, about my current state: pain is persistently more extensive -- all the way through both shoulders, intensity is about the same as usual with a couple of spikes to 9-10/10 each week, medication barely adequate. On the good side, if I'm doing anything about sailing or working on my new keeled home, I can work far longer than I ever thought possible -- several hours at a stretch, sometimes. The pain comes up, but it doesn't flare; I can work through it without sending it out of control.

It's as if anything connected with sailing floods my system with so much happy-juice that it keeps the hellacious cocktail of the pain cascade mostly in the shaker. She was really stoked about my having a boat. And it doing me so much good.

Afterwards, as I was scheduling my next appointment, Mai Hong, the physical therapist who used to work with me during my 2-month intensive, saw me and came up to visit. She wanted to introduce a new patient (someone who was going into the next round of the program I did) to an alumna. The other woman looked like someone who's bearing up under the unbearable, so of course I treated her perfectly normally.

Mai Hong peered at me with fascinated intensity. "You look ... great! The expression in your eyes is different." She used to monitor my state by the look in my eyes.

She spotted, in my first few minutes in the program, what a desperate simulation every smile and word that came out of me was. She spent most of my 2 months there looking for ways to get through and around the hard, tight masks I wore -- either the brittle cheer or the anaesthetic depression, whichever one was up at the time. She helped crack it, and could spot the daylight coming through -- moreover, she could point it out to me and name it: "I can tell I'm seeing the genuine you." That was important.

I said, "You remember I was sailing with the disabled sailors in San Francisco?"

She nodded.

Smiling all over, I told her, "Well, I realized that made me really happy, so I bought a boat and I'm making it my home." (See the Handicaptain's Ship Log for more details.)

She gasped, and in her next breath said, "That's great!" and congratulated me. She just stood there another moment, still peering into my eyes, trying to take it all in.

"It's quite a change, isn't it," I agreed. She nodded. I realized the staring might seem odd to the newcomer, but I felt comfortable with it. I remarked to Mai Hong, "That's what we live for as healers, to see that change."

She said, "Ye-eah," slowly, still drinking in the sun-streaked life pouring off me, stunned by comparison to what she saw 6 months ago.

I've been questioning myself a lot lately -- old scripts trying to play out, I'm sure, given how unreasonably they've troubled me -- but I saw my "genuine self," as I am right now, in Mai Hong's peering, bottomless gaze ... and I felt absolutely fine.