ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an essay on the author's experience of writing about pain. In 2003, the author slipped and fell heavily on a marble bathroom floor in Warsaw, injuring her pelvis. As the acute pain of that accident turned first into the severe chronic pain of an obscure nerve entrapment, and then into the intractable neuropathic pain of nerve damage, she became aware of much awkwardness around, and reluctance to speak plainly about, physical pain – continuing pain, in particular. Amorphous and abstruse, physical pain flickers at the edges of thought, communication and medical science, defying description and, when extreme, reducing verbal expression to a pre-language of moans and cries. Hidden deep within a network of cells and synapses, it can only be independently verified by a functional MRI of the brain, in which it may be seen as flares of light as it occurs.
