I sit here on my couch downstairs while your mother showers and after I have put you to bed. 11 weeks spent with you so far, and I am getting the hang of swaddling you tightly into one or two blankets, holding you in my arms as you peer up at me, sometimes giving me a smile that lets me know you recognize me and you love to be held, feed you a bottle of two to three ounces of breastmilk, lift you up vertically and place you on my shoulder while I tap lightly and rub your back intermittently in order to bring up a burp or two, and then I bounce up and down as I pace the upstairs until I feel your body go limp enough that I can place you in your bassinet you are soon to outgrow. I am extremely itchy directly under my jawline as I have just shaved my four inch beard after your mother and I discovered a small fungal infection starting on the left side of my neck. Now I am just down to a mustache, one I have not shaven for four years and one that I do not plan on shaving for a very long time. We are not sure how it started but it could be from a recent lack of hygiene and an abundance of working outdoors in the heat and humidity during a Portland summer heatwave. You were there while I shaved, held by your mother, in order to avoid the chance that I may surprise you to the point of fright when I come down the stairs and you see me without a beard for the first time or to avoid the chance that you may not recognize your father anymore.
The itch of the rash has been a distraction though from my chronic tooth pain that I have in my bottom right gum that exists mainly around the molar area that mainly exists around tooth 31 and 32 but has a tendency of radiating up into the incisor on the same side which is tooth 26. I have had this pain for over ten years now intermittently, a third of my entire lifespan, but it has become a much more constant part of my life for the past six months or so. It has arrived to a point where it hurts most of the day and especially when I eat but I am so used to it now that I rarely flinch when I feel it anymore. It has been crippling at times and there have been days in the past where I have not been able to talk. The silver lining is that your mother has a good sense of what I am trying to say now when I have my mouth full such as when I am brushing my teeth and need to let her know something. But to be honest, it is disingenuous to call it tooth pain at all as I have had three root canals, three oral surgeries, two teeth pulled, and six incorrect diagnoses by the hands of five dentists, four orthodontists, two oral surgeons, a doctor, and a physician assistant-certified. They have all stepped into the ring with my chronic pain and all came out with a worse record than they had before. I have been told that it is most likely referred pain from somewhere else in my body and that is the constant pre-diagnostic take I have heard over the past year or so. It could be something small, something I can’t describe because I don’t know how to describe what I do not know, or it could be something major. I am reminded of an episode of Frasier, I believe it was in season 10 of the show, where Niles has a toothache that has been bothering him for days and while in Cafe Nervosa, him and Roz, who thinks that it is just a sinus issue (something that Rachel has brought up to me as I have horrible allergies), discuss that it could be referred pain in which Niles proclaims, “...if I had a heart condition, I might not have pain in my chest, I might have pain in my tooth. So while you’re probably right about the sinus infection, let’s not discount the one in ten thousand chance that it might be something more serious”. As the episode progresses, Niles continues to beat impossible odds by winning two fanny packs from the caps on water bottles, seeing another couple whose names are Niles and Daphne (who were married by this point in the series), and having his car struck by lightning for example. He later finds out in the episode that he has a relative who died of a heart attack when he was Niles’ age and after going to a cardiologist, he finds out that it is indeed a heart condition and must immediately check in to a hospital.
It is something I have considered and thought about throughout the years and I guess all I can say is at least I am still here. I do not know why I keep putting off a doctor visit to run some tests but it most likely stems from a fatal flaw of mine consisting of only minimal anxieties that could also be translated as major anxieties. I am just not sure. I am not afraid of death in a relative sense, I understand that death is something that happens, that it must happen, and once it happens, that is all. All my embarrassing memories over the years that I still think about nearly every day will be gone. All the wrongs I have done to other people, candy bars I stole from the dime store in Bonners as a child, all the misspeaking and all the shame of my life this far will be gone. Shame is the main reason for the anxiety that I do have though. Shame is an ailment that is necessary to the human being to keep them grounded in reality, it is born from the consciousness of wrongdoing and past foolish behaviors. Regret and shame can go hand in hand and both of these things are important in a person’s life to understand and analyze. Everyone feels shame. Everyone knows shame. But from the things that I am ashamed about comes with the sense of struggling masculinity and from there I ride down a spiral of anxiety in the world at large. But is this really any different from any other person that is not me? No, not necessarily. Are there people who do not fail at certain things they try during their lives? Does it make me less of a man to shed a tear or two for the things I am ashamed of what I have done or am ashamed of things that I cannot do? Does it really matter? I believe it does. And while I am ashamed I have not gone to have these tests performed to figure out where this pain is coming from, I struggle with the idea of how I would handle a major condition so soon after the birth of you and the fact that I may not be with you for some time or that I may look like less of a man or like a horrible father for not being there for you, even for the shortest period of time. It is baseless, it is untrue, but it is something that I worry about. The idea eats away at me constantly, and it is contradictory, I suppose. If I did have a major condition I had been ignoring, I could be dead in short order having put off the diagnosis and my subsequent demise would make me appear less of a man and more like the horrible father I dread. And it would be something I would be remembered by. Something I would be ashamed of if there happened to be an afterlife. Throughout the years, this pain of mine has brought me to the brink of many a metaphorical sheer rock face but nothing that was insurmountable. The first one is obvious as it is the brink of insanity. Chronic pain affects the sufferer’s life in more ways than I care to list. I have dealt with sleep deprivation, depression, concentration issues, and mood changes due to this pain over the years and as the pain continues with no end in sight, with no concrete diagnoses or cures from numerous health care professionals, it can seem like it is coming from deep in my own psyche. Am I just imagining it? Is it stress-caused? Is it my mind telling me in its own fucked up way that something is wrong with me or how I am living my life? Throughout the first eight or nine years, the pain was strong, often debilitating, for about a month before disappearing overnight and I would be “normal” for a month or two-- until the pain came back. Sometimes it would be on its own, sometimes it would be after a root canal or a surgery. But a month or two down the line, sometimes even longer, it would be back, continuing to eat away at my mental well-being. I would grow irritable, I would talk to friends and family in a blunt and curt way because talking would only cause me more pain. After years and years of this process, I continually question my own sanity. And through all of this, I have been on the brink of ruining personal relationships due to what this pain, and what it means in my life, has made me feel. Frustration, not in the relationship itself but in the relationship due to my pain, has been prevalent in my life for the past decade and as frustration builds, it has tried to create rifts between myself and my wife, my friends, my family, and with myself. The pain and frustration has brought me to the brink of the acceptance of my own personal death numerous times. Not so much in a suicidal way as I would never kill myself per se even though I understand why people do and through my own moral compass I find it completely and morally understandable for someone who no longer wants to be a part of our world to take themselves out of it. A human has every right to do so. Of course, I do not mean a person who suffers from a severe mental condition where they are not thinking for themselves or able to think for themselves though there are circumstances that could be argued in this sense. I mean that if anyone can say to themselves that they have lived a good life and that they are ready for death, I am accepting of their personal choice. One circumstance for myself that I have written in my own living will is that if I am in a situation that forces me to live off life support in a hospital bed for any sort of extended period of time, I am to be taken off of life support as my quality of life, and the quality of life of those close and dear to me, is not what I consider worth the time and money for them or for myself. I can understand that by saying that this chronic pain has brought me to the brink of the acceptance of my own personal death, it sounds like I mean I have been suicidal. But it is more so the concept of death that I mean. I never wanted to take my own life due to the pain I feel but there have been numerous times in my life that I did not mind if Death came around to visit me. I view the idea of death as a comfort rather than as something to fear in my own life. Where someone is in excruciating pain, whether physical or emotional, death sometimes is the only thing that can cure how they feel. When a person dies, there is nothing else. There is no shining light. There are no pearly gates. This of course is not an absolute as we as humans can never be 100% sure where life came from nor if there is an afterlife once we pass on. But I find more solace in the idea that there is just a long sleep at the end, that we are no longer in existence other than in the memories of the people whom we had touched during our life. I hope there is no afterlife. This is mainly due to what I was discussing before about shame. I hope I don’t have to live in a heaven-like reality where I still have all my shameful memories from my past, all the embarrassment from my grade school years and even adulthood thus far, all of the uncomfortable parts of a person’s life that they, for some reason, don't think they will dwell on for an infinite amount of time while in the afterlife. But I have grown to live with the pain even though I am relatively trapped by the pain. I will figure it out one day. Some bright young doctor running basic tests will be able to tell me what is going on with my mouth, my body, my pain. And life will go on. That is what life does: it never ends until it does. You are trapped in life whether you like it or not and it is just you in the end, at the end, starting into the void. You must make life what it is and what it should be until you cannot anymore.
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