Suffering: The Tail that Can’t be Pinned

Strangers are horrified to learn I was hit by a car as I stepped into a crosswalk one brisk winter afternoon, and I don’t blame them. My friends and family are horrified. I’m still horrified, too. On December 3rd, 2016, a man sped straight through a red light – and straight into me. I’d looked both ways twice that afternoon since the case in my handheld a 150-year-old violin inside. I was a professional violinist, making my way toward my first Christmas concert of the season. The world’s greatest idiot (at least for that day) was driving 40 mph, and seemed to have forgotten his car had any brakes. He remembered after my head splintered his windshield.

When I arrived at the Casa Colina rehabilitation hospital that Christmas Eve, I was terrified and frozen. Well, not exactly frozen, but very much terrified.

My damaged brain cried out for the old, familiar room in the intensive-care hospital – a hospital now over forty miles away. New nurses fussed over me as they slid me into bed (I tried not to scream), adjusted my broken body, and poured a “meal” down my feeding tube. “Oh my! You’re way too young to be here, honey!” became a mantra as intake staff shuffled in and out of my room. I was too drugged and frightened to scrutinize anyone at the time, but later I was to learn all those faces and the nurses to whom they belonged. Nurses who cared. Nurses who believed I mattered. Many of them befriended me and I became diva-in-residence for the rest of my stay. (Yes, I was at least 20-30 years younger than their other “young” patients, but still.)

Two years later, I write this at home in my wheelchair. It’s 3 pm but I’m still wearing pajamas – those same pajamas I wore on my Casa Colina Christmas two years ago. Beside me is a cup of coffee that I think – I hope – might stave off a teeny bit of the sick feeling that follows a severe seizure.

Who knew that two strokes and a severe traumatic brain injury could leave you with epilepsy, too? Saying I’ve suffered “a lot” feels underwhelming at best. But have I? Have I really suffered a lot? Have I really suffered at all? I haven’t been friendless. I haven’t been homeless. I haven’t been food-less. I most certainly haven’t lacked medical care. Anyone struggling against those odds might argue that they’re the ones who have really suffered, not me. Comparing all of us, how do we know which predicaments qualify as real suffering? The more I ask the question, the less I know the answer. I feel like a blindfolded little kid trying to pin a “definition tail” on a donkey named Suffering.

I may not be a little kid, but I am still blindfolded. Where’s my tail? Where’s that donkey?

My family tells me that when I woke up in ICU a few weeks before I transferred to the rehab hospital, I was a three-year-old in a twenty-three-year-old’s body. My battered brain could barely make words, and my vocal cords were too damaged to speak more than a few at a time. They hypothesize that I had just re-entered my “teens” at the onset of my holiday stay at Casa Colina. I would say that I was most certainly an adult when I arrived…but then again that is a teenager’s trademark retort.

However old I behaved, my head had cleared enough to puzzle over two riddles: 1) what had happened to me while I was asleep, and 2) where that landed me in the grand scheme of things. #1 was fairly easy to decipher, so let’s jump to #2.

It seems odd to me, given my microscopic environment at the time, but some of my first lengthy thought progressions focused on world crises.

I recalled many of the news articles I read that November before the accident. Articles about the strife in Syria and the refugee crisis. Who was I compared to all those victims? I was not mutilated by bombings or burned by poisonous gases. Even the politically neutral medical teams could not reach all the injured. Many victims died alone in agony. Perhaps some still drag themselves along in mutilated lives today. Many of the refugees who escaped Syria weren’t physically wounded per se, but who was I compared to them, either? I wasn’t country-less, or trapped in a refugee camp, or tossed back into my own lethal country.

When doctors and nurses – or anyone for that matter – sat by my bed repeating how sorry they felt for me, or how surprised they were at my cheeriness, Syria ate away at the back of my mind.

My Casa Colina time also overlapped with an electrical emergency in Florida. A power outage permeated most of the state in those first days of 2017.

There were too many hospital patients in general, and especially too many nursing home patients in particular, for everyone to be transferred to functioning facilities. Many of the stranded surplus died from the heat. My eyes meandered around my own state-of-the-art room, taking inventory of all I had not earned. I grasped the unsettling reality that my own youthful self should have been discharged to a nursing home, had not indomitable friends and family battled on my behalf. Casa Colina is one of the best neurological rehab centers in California. (FYI, you’re very welcome for that statistic. I was fact-checking online several weeks ago and a pop-up ad triggered a cluster of seizures. I was in my wheelchair for the rest of the day.)

But back to my stay at Casa Colina.

I snuggled under snowy white sheets plus loads of blankets from friends and family. My room was freezing – and even more so when contrasted to the un-air-conditioned medical facilities in Florida. Unlike their shortage of any real food, my meals were nutritious and (mostly) delicious. My drugs came on time every four hours. Every four minutes would have been much preferred, but that’s beside my point. Therapists dragged me and all my broken bones out of bed three times every day. Compared to the stifled nursing home residents in Florida, did I really suffer?

On a spiritual level, I think of all the people who have been martyred around the world. In my life experience, many doctors and nurses actually seem interested in a faith that fuels my 25-year-old’s joy in the teeth of a torn-up life. Many wonder if that permanently damaged brain softens the sharp edges of my days.

They’re wrong.

I’m painfully aware of my loss every morning that I wake up, every morning that I take nine pills after breakfast, every morning that I put on sunglasses to shield my eyes from the fluorescent light in our apartment building’s hallway. But my faith keeps me fighting. I do have to admit that I’ve undergone much mental and emotional loss, but not as much as people whose faith translates to torment. My family has also suffered with me, but not as much as if I had died.

So did (and do!) I really suffer compared with all the traumatic experiences around the globe?

That’s a debatable question. To say “No” to my suffering would diminish the pain of many people who have been through something similar to what I’ve been through. Or maybe they’ve been through less than me on the outside, but have been scarred more than me on the inside. On the other hand, saying “Yes” to my suffering could disrespect the magnitude of any negative experience that is greater than mine. And there is unlimited pain that far exceeds my own.

If suffering is so impossible to pinpoint, then how do you know when you see real suffering?

I think the answer lies in an analogy my husband sometimes shares. When nurses checked on me in the hospital, they always asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. We knew that I had an unusually high tolerance for pain even before my accident. After the accident, when a nurse came to give me my shockingly heavy narcotics and I said I was only at 7 out of 10, what did the 7 really mean? If the nurse went on to the patient in the next room, and that patient had an extremely low tolerance for pain, they might also say their pain level was at a 7. Maybe their 7 would only be a 2 on my scale.

A Syrian bomb victim would probably laugh my 7 to shame. But no matter who answers –or what their answer is – the nurse would never argue that because some bomb survivor in some other hospital said their pain was a 7 out of 10, then mine could only be a 2, and the patient’s next to me could barely be a 0.25.

No. Each person’s pain is as significant as their ability to tolerate it.

So I think that’s how we should measure suffering. Not on a global scale, which would be literally impossible, but rather on the amount of trauma a specific experience inflicts on a specific individual. I’ve come to believe that there is no “definition tail” to pin on a donkey named Suffering. Perhaps all we can say is that each person’s pain matters. It matters to them, it matters to God, and it should certainly matter to us. Perhaps this philosophy can open our hearts and our eyes to pain around us, whether or not it measures up to our personal perception of “real” pain. That’s exactly how God approaches our pain, always has, and always will. Perhaps it’s better not to navel gaze at our pain, wondering if we’re the ones who’ve really suffered, and wishing others would cater to us more.

Perhaps it’s best to look outside ourselves and see another person’s pain without comparing theirs to ours or to anyone else’s. If you see someone hurting (and you will!), take a minute to remind them that you see their pain and that they matter. Mattering is truly the best medicine.

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Author: Grace Utomo

My name is Grace Utomo. I currently live in San Jose. CA, and am pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I felt called to write after I survived being hit by a car as a pedestrian three years ago. Although I’m housebound, I’ve used my time at home to write and share my story through various church organizations.