I needed words to go forward.

The whole thing was very private and difficult to describe, although Atwater had had a long and interesting off the record conversation about it with the Oregon multiple amputee who’d organized a series of high profile anti HMO events in 1999. It also now occurred to him for the first time that ‘gone in the stomach,’ which was a regional term for n

“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”

Attempting to reduce pain that was context dependent to a number just made it clear that there was no way to make this invisible symptom legible to others. And the poet in me found all the metaphors for pain to be limited. “Burning,” “tingling,” “stabbing”—these words did little to describe pain’s reality, which ebbed and flowed according to its ow