Adjusting the Primal

I came into pain. I did not remember how, nor did I recall, much less understand, why. Even after sorting out my thoughts and analyzing them immediately after, no explanation came. My memory of the event, on the other hand, was changed as a result of that analysis.

I, a needle stuck in my right arm, felt the first effects of unconsciousness pulling at the edges of clarity in the doctor’s office. This was momentarily after assuring the nurse I felt fine and moments before updating my answer to a significantly less reassuring “okay, now I don’t.” My next memory was unlike any other I’ve ever experienced in my life. I did not understand who or where I was, satisfying the most basic levels of awareness only through the acknowledgement of pain. To all intents and purposes, I was not thinking. I did not process information, no immediate conclusions or logical streams of thought carried themselves through my mind. I was aware of only, and awareness in fact was, an uncompromising pain that spread through every particle of my body, pain receptor-free brain excluded. My brain was instead plagued with the fear of incomprehensible information, a pain all its own.

The pain varied in intensity but did not subside, waxing without the relief of waning, every additional increment building upon what was already there. It increased, pushing past what my brain assumed was the maximum, until it crashed down, allowing room for self-awareness, the realization of what had happened and my usual method of dealing with misfortune: cynicism; “Oh, I fainted.” It was the first thing I said, hopefully as nonchalantly as I intended to, though I had more pressing issues to deal with at the moment.

Immediately, I sought to figure out what had happened. Since I still remembered the pain, sharp though dulling in my memory as the seconds clicked by, I assumed it was in my short-term memory, generally spanning over a length of 20-30 seconds. This knowledge was, at that point, essentially useless, a mere attempt to control something utterly beyond my control. While I remembered the pain itself, I had no way of describing it. Metaphor after metaphor spilled into my mind, followed shortly by past experiences, each inadequate in its own way, each a failure in my attempts to describe my experience to myself. Salt spilled into an open wound, literary, but not a personal experience, it’d have to make room for something more relevant; hitting a nerve against a hard object, too numb, though it provides the necessary saturation of an area. A punch to the solar plexus replicates the feeling of helplessness and defeat, but doesn’t carry with it the literally mind-numbing pain. Walking on a leg that decided to fall asleep due to poor circulation has the same numbness and unavoidable pain, though blown away in magnitude the way a candle would be by the sun’s wind. To this day, I have no comparable experience nor can I in full honesty claim that I understand what caused what I can only describe as an episode, or put more optimistically, a lesson in primal fear.

In hindsight, remembering a time when I wasn’t thinking is odd. I remember seeing my surroundings, the office, nurse and doctor, called in as soon as I blacked out, but not understanding any of them for what they were. I can’t remember any sounds, yet I assume the nurse and doctor were talking to me. I remember the wave of awareness that cleared away the incomprehensible mess of information that I was unable to process, yet not the state, or lack thereof, of awareness that preceded it. It is in essence a memory dominated so thoroughly by one characteristic, pain, that it is a memory of pain, with everything else, including memory itself, giving way to allow more for nothing other than more pain.

At the same time, it is a memory I know I have modified. This occurred partially as a result of thoughtful contemplation, intended to clarify the record of events, as well as the natural processes that govern my mind’s workings, specifically my memory. The human memory works by association but I can not adequately imagine the level of pain I felt, or a comparable one. Instead, my mind defaults to the closest approximation I can conjure up, the result of several metaphors and other memories blending together to create as close a memory as I can, based upon what I remembered directly after my cynical statement and the inevitable mental review that followed.

I remember seeing the nurse but not comprehending her image, assigning her, as a concept, to her image in my memory, retrospectively. The blurry memory of the room allowed me to figure out my body’s position and my head’s angle as slouching to the left and looking down, again, purely in retrospective analysis. Judging from the self-preservative tendency to test one’s body by moving, I can guess that the waves of pain were caused by attempts to move, with each successive wave inciting further movement, a painful feedback loop.

I can not help but wonder if my mind could have handled the situation in a different way. Did searching in vain for the source of pain delay my eventual awareness, and with it, the pain’s alleviation? If I was less inquisitive naturally, would I have been spared some fraction of pain? By even entertaining the idea, I’ve accepted a grain of blame, yet another part of the memory that I know, for a fact, I added. These modifications were made immediately, as I reviewed my short-term memory and processed it. Later, as well as in the course of this documentation, these modifications were reinforced, cemented in their truth by repetition and acknowledgement.

What my memory boils down to is the unexplained removal of the very nature of my being from my conscious awareness. Essentially an inhuman memory shaped by human thought.