Hot Under the Collar

How do you reconcile your ignorance of another person's pain with their patently apparent rudeness? Unlike the worm that comes out a beautiful butterfly, when the butterfly is pain it is manifested as a worm -- transforming the beautiful into the ugly. And just like the worm into the butterfly, if you don't know what's going on, you don't understand how it happens. Often it's made more obsfuscatory through the direct but unconscious actions of the person in pain, rendering this person alone when the cries for help are interpreted as anger, distrust and solipsism.

That's what pain does. It transforms pretty into ugly, thoughts into dogma, poetry into rhetoric, honesty into tirade, calm into shrill. In dog terms it turns you into a jerk. Arthritis is the master jerk maker. It makes constant withdrawals from your socially-acceptable-actions bank, and so, with less in reserve, you're more likely to engage in what the non-pain population would call inappropriate behavior - especially in public, but most insidiously in private as it tears apart self-esteem, judgement, self-confidence, replacing it with self-destructive self-hatred. And all the non-pain public sees is aggression or capitulation. The world prefers capitulation, of course.

It's why, sometimes, you need to not be around other people with arthritis. You get your strength from this unsuspecting non-pain universe, or from somewhere inside in the aftermath of an emotional downhill ride.

The social ghettoization of the disease has its benefits which ere extolled at every AF/AJAO conference, but the downsides of depression, anger, loss of self-image and the stress of coping within a group that is sometimes unable to synthesize what it needs to be positive, are palpable, especially in retrospect. When this happens, we don't know we're hurting ourselves until we're already hurt and surveying the emotional devistation.

This happened to me and, because I only sweat through my paws, I got very hot under my collar. There was no one worth biting, knocking down or farting at, so a solo retreat to a sushi bar relieved the stress (yes we eat raw fish too. We get our Omega 3-6- and 9 the same way you do.) Actually, I wasn't exactly sitting at the bar. My table was around the back and my tablecloth was a 5 mil very chic black with a twist tie. Besides being very romantic in the dimly-lit dumpster, the main benefit was not having to go through the Amex decline ritual. Amex stopped recognizing squirrel and rabbit entrails as payment back in the 80s after RJ Reynolds shareholders stopped letting the executive dogs fly in their own plane, and Pat Robertson stole the 700 Club from Jim and Tammy Faye which meant Tammy's dog lost his seat on the Jesus , and Pat gained a satellite. Those were the days, but these days I'm leaving home without it, following my nose to the fish out back, and, like the corporate dogs, flying cargo.

So with a belly full of eel and tekkamaki, snoot full of wasabi and ginger, and a kidney load of what I think was green tea, I headed back to the scene of multiple pain points, and rationalized that it was just the heat of Miami that was producing my heated reaction to the situation I found myself in. But then I'm pretty good at denial.