impossible to communicate the nature and severity of such pain. As Scarry puts it, “To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Hearing about pain that we do not feel takes us to the limits of empathy, the place where it all breaks down. I can only know my pain, and you can only know yours. We’ve tried all sorts of ways to get around this axiom of consciousness. We ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten, or we tell them to point at the face that looks most like their pain. We ask them if the pain is sharp or dull, burning or stabbing—but all of these are metaphors, not the thing itself. We turn to feeble similes, and say that the pain is like a jackhammer at the base of the skull, or like a hot needle through the eye. We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.
* * *
Unlike meningitis caused by bacteria, viral meningitis is rarely fatal and usually resolves on its own within seven to ten days. This sounds like a reasonable period of time to be sick, until you’re actually inside of it. Sick days do not pass like well ones do, like water through cupped hands. Sick days last. When I had the headache, I felt certain I would have it forever. The pain of each moment was terrible, but what made me despair was the knowledge that in the next moment, and the next, the pain would still be there. The pain is so entire that you begin to believe it will never end, that it cannot possibly end. Psychologists call this “catastrophizing,” but that term fails to acknowledge that pain is a catastrophe. The catastrophe, really.
For many people, including me, the initial period of viral meningitis is followed by several months of occasional headaches, which arrive like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Over a year or so, my headaches grew more infrequent, and by now they’ve almost entirely subsided. I can hardly even remember what the headaches felt like. I remember that they were terrible, that they circumscribed my life, but I cannot return to my pain in any visceral or experiential way. Even though I myself had the pain, I can’t fully empathize with the me who had it, because now I am a different me, with different pangs and discomforts. I am grateful that my head doesn’t hurt, but not in the way I would have been grateful if, in the midst of the pain, it had suddenly disappeared. Maybe we forget so that we can go on.
* * *
I became sick with meningitis just after returning to Indianapolis from a trip where I visited both Ethiopia and Orlando, Florida. My neurologist told me I probably caught the virus in Orlando, because, and I’m quoting him here, “You know, Florida.”
I spent a week in the hospital, although they couldn’t do much other than keep me hydrated and treat my pain. I slept a lot. When I was awake, I was in pain. And I mean in pain. Inside of it.
Of course, aside from the fact that it doesn’t usually kill you, there is nothing to recommend about viral meningitis. As Susan Sontag wrote, “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning.” The virus that spread through my spinal fluid had no meaning; it did not replicate to teach me a lesson, and any insights I gleaned from the unsharable pain could’ve been learned less painfully elsewhere. Meningitis, like the virus that caused it, wasn’t a metaphor or a narrative device. It was just a disease.
But we are hardwired to look for patterns, to make constellations from the stars. There must be some logic to the narrative, some reason for the misery. When I was sick, people would say to me, “At least you’re getting a break from all that work,” as if I wanted a break from my work. Or they’d say, “At least you’ll make a full recovery,” as if now was not the only moment that the pain allowed me to live inside. I know they were trying to tell me (and themselves) a tightly plotted and thematically consistent story, but there’s little comfort to be found in such stories when you know damn well they aren’t true.