The Iron Maiden

The blog is called what it is called because of a thing I could not find a better word for.

In the medieval period there was a device. You put a person inside it and you closed it, and when it closed, spikes came in on them from every direction at once. The point of it was not to kill. A person could stay alive in there for a long time. The point was that every part of you hurt at the same time, and there was no position you could move into that made it stop, and it went on until somebody decided it would not.

I did not reach for that image because it was dramatic. I reached for it because it is the only thing I have ever heard described that matches what happens to me two or three times a day.

It comes on. I can feel it starting. That is almost the worst part, because there is a stretch of time where you know exactly what is coming and there is nothing to be done about it.

Then everything hurts. Not one thing. Everything. My knees, which is the part I had before any of this. My back. My hands, which have never hurt before in my life. My wrists. My ankles. My hands and wrists have started swelling. That is new. Nobody warned me about that because nobody warned me about anything.

There is no position that helps. You try them all. You end up trying them all several times, which you know is pointless while you are doing it.

I have recordings of myself in the middle of the night. I did not make them on purpose at first. I am screaming on them. Somebody in this house has heard it. That is not a figure of speech and it is not me being colorful. There is audio.

One night I went out of the bed onto the floor and could not get back up. A big man on a floor cannot push himself up when his knees, his wrists and his hands are all failing at once, because those are the four things you push up with. I crawled. I want that written down plainly because I think people imagine withdrawal as being sick and sweaty and uncomfortable, like a bad flu, and they picture a person lying in bed. They do not picture a fifty-eight-year-old man crawling across his own floor at three in the morning.

The sickness is its own thing on top of the pain. My asthma is worse. I keep rescue inhalers on every desk in this house, and I am reaching for them more than I have ever reached for them.

I want to be accurate about one thing, because accuracy is the only thing I have. None of this is the arthritis. The arthritis is why I was in treatment in the first place, and it is still there, and it is not going anywhere, because it never was. What is new is everything that got added on top of it the day the medication stopped.

And the part that makes it something other than bad luck is this. There is a procedure for coming off these medications. It is called a taper. It exists precisely because everybody in medicine has known for a very long time what happens to a person when you do not use it. The warnings are on paper. They are on the label. A pharmacist said it to me out loud on the telephone and I have the transcript.

So when I say it feels like being put in a device, I am not only talking about the pain.

I am talking about the fact that somebody closed it.