Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.
I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.
