A friend of mine who had been ill for a while used to refer to paracetamol tablets as Snowballs. At first hearing, it seemed to make sense. They were, after all, white and round. But they were round in the two dimensional sense of ‘circular’, rather than the three dimensional sense of ‘spherical’. Since my friend was a man who normally employed great precision in his choice of words, it began to nag at me. Eventually I asked him why he nominated them in that way. “Because”, he replied mournfully, “trying to treat pain with paracetamol is like trying to cool the sun by throwing snowballs at it.”
I recently visited the doctor with a pain in my hip. Nothing serious having shown up on the x-ray, he advised me to take pain killers and rest it in a good position. I enquired what constituted a good position. Wearily, as though explaining the use of a comma for the fiftieth time to a particularly stupid child, he said that a good position was one in which the hip didn’t hurt. “But if I’m taking pain killers, surely I won’t know if it would be hurting?” He said nothing, and concentrated on typing something onto my computerised notes. I guess that patients’ rights under the Data Protection Act prevented him from writing what he really wanted to, in case I should ever demand to see a copy; but as children we all knew the story that gypsy peg-sellers had secret marks which they could leave on your gatepost, invisible to the gorgio world, but unmistakably encouraging other Romanies to come in and try their luck with the Soft Touch who lived there, or alternatively miss out that house and its Baskerville-like hound. I have no doubt that somewhere in my notes now is a coded word such as ‘empained’ which will warn the rest of the medical profession ‘Has found out the truth that painkillers do not relieve pain. May need to be taken out by a hit-man if he starts to blab.’
I had in fact long suspected the true nature of analgaesics. I was once given a gastroscopy, which was preceded by some kind of semi-anaesthetic painkiller which they said would, whilst keeping me technically conscious, render me so woozy that I would barely realize what was going on. The instant that they removed the apparatus from my mouth I pointed out that I had been fully conscious the whole time and felt everything. They made the sympathetic clucking noises which they obviously saved for patients who were not merely woozy, but positively hallucinating. Only when they came back a couple of minutes later and found me sitting up reading a book on advanced Bridge defence problems did they begin to look a little sheepish. Nothing was said.
There are of course stronger painkillers. No doubt if you are lying at the scene of a road traffic accident with both arms positioned some distance from your body, and a lorry’s gearstick inserted into your kidney they will offer you one. But anything less than that and you will have to qualify by working your way up from paracetamol; perhaps even further down the list than that, since I am near to being convinced that the first round of paracetamol consists in fact of placebos.
Likewise with dosages. Once when suffering from a suspected exploding appendix (that may not be the correct medical term; since it fortunately transpired to be something else I never really found out) I broke the habit of a lifetime and asked for a painkiller. They obliged. I clearly had made a mistake by not screaming like a banshee as I made the request, because as they administered it they told me it was “just a small dose”. They were not lying. The dose was clearly so small that it had no effect whatsoever. After an hour or so of continuing pain, I resummoned a nurse and asked if I could have a large dose this time: in fact, if one were available I would be happy to try out the elephantine dose. I was reassured that I would of course be allowed a large dose, but since I had had the small dose only an hour previously I would have to wait another three hours. By the time that came round I was better; or perhaps I had simply become inured to the pain; or possibly I had died and gone into a parallel universe where the hospital décor was identical, but the pain thresholds were different.
Despite the wonders of the electronic age allowing hospitals to link up instantly, every hospital starts again. No matter that in another similar building twenty miles down the road you yesterday proved entirely immune to any effect from anything below the level of intravenous morphine, today in Building Two, should you request it, you will be told, “Well, let’s just try you with paracetamol first.”
All of this may imply that I relish the idea of stuffing myself with strong analgaesics. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe, as I always have, that pain is a communication from your body, and you should no more tell it to shut up every time it speaks than you should a child doing the same. But as with your child who begins to sing ‘Dan Dan The Lavatory Man’ in a posh restaurant, there are times when you not merely want it to shut up, but to shut up immediately. How one longs for the day when Ronseal break into the drugs market and begin selling ‘Pain Killers – they do exactly what it says on the packet’.
If shortly after reading this you hear that my body has been found near Harley Street
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