My Old Man enjoyed working in his shed. It was his escape from the rest of the family. What he did in there was anyone’s business.

On one fine Saturday morning he inadvertently made the activities in his shed accessible to us all.

“Tommy! Quick! Get in here,” he called from a barely opened door.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” I enquired. Occasions when I was invited into the Inner Sanctum of his life and wellbeing were rare. 

As I entered and my eyes became accustomed to the dim light and haze of cigarette smoke I noticed Dad, on all fours, rummaging through a pile of sawdust under his saw bench.

“Get down here and help me find it,” he whispered.

“What are you looking for,” I whispered back. I had no idea why I whispered. I don’t, usually. There was no one else around to hear.

“My finger,” he answered. 

In that moment I went through several levels of emotional response from disbelief, through squeamishness, onto disgust, and concluding with the feel of pain in my fingers as if it were my digit we were in search of.

 Pain is such a universal experience. We all know how it is to feel pain, even if it belongs to someone else.

We know it hurts. 

There are also different sorts of pain. My doctor would ask me how my pain felt in accordance with the a simple 1 to 10 scale.

“From 1 to ten how severe is that hip pain right now,” he’d ask.

“10”, I’d emphasis promptly and proficiently.

“You know women say childbirth is a 10” he’d sneer.

“Well, good on them. Since I’m not about to give birth I hardly think it’s fair to compare.” I’d then run through a string of superlatives to emphasis my agony and place my hand flat on my side to indicate the extent of the discomfort.

 Strangely enough, we don’t feel pain in the place of inducement; we feel it in our brain.

 My Old and I never found his finger. He was less grateful than I. For many years he still continued to behave as if he had found it and had it comfortably returned to the place from which it came. He’d point with it, scratch it, scratch with it, attempt to trim its nail, and feel the aches and pains in his arthritic fingers as he grew old as if he had all 10 instead of 9 and a small indentation where number 10 once sat.

The problem was that we all forgot he ever had a 10th but his brain never forgot. Nor did his brain ever forget the feelings that dissipated digit once experienced.

 On the other hand, I have information provided from reliable sources that women tend to forget quite readily the intense pain of childbirth, leastwise they might not be so willing to have more children. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the memory of extreme pain is lessened in all of us. I remember many of my collisions with hard things but invariably don’t remember how much it hurt at the time or even shortly after. And, believe me, some of those impacts must have really hurt.

Funnily enough, it’s only now that the pain returns. I call it Old Pain, the sort of pain that requires of me to make a noise like a poorly oiled hinge as I move. It’s not the same pain that probably occurred at the time of the intrusion. More like a pain to remind me how foolhardy I have been and to slow down a bit.

 It’s quite possible that lingering pain, or what we generally call chronic pain is the remnants of old injuries that no longer need to alert the brain to damage incurred. This seems to indicate that we are having pain for no reason at all.

 Pain does serve an important purpose. It tells the body to get the fuck outa there. Quite often it’s the only way we learn of the potential danger ensuing.

I recall seeing my mother hurling herself backwards across the wet laundry floor as a result of touching a faulty power point. Not only did she feel the pain and remember how it happened for future reference but so did I. And I didn’t even need to be electrocuted to establish that memory.

 As I grew older and recognised the advantages and disadvantages of pain I became acutely aware of how important it is to recognise this pain-brain relationship. So much so that, as a budding researcher, I would carry out experiments to verify any hypothesis I might consider.

Take my younger brother for example. A right winger, he was. ‘Sooky’ I called him anytime he kicked his toe or got a splinter or grazed a bend on his body.

He’d go on for hours, sounding like the cat was stuck in the fly screen door.

“What are you on about now?” I’d uninterestingly enquire.

“I caught my finger in the kitchen drawer,” he’d whine. 

“I have the perfect cure,” I’d suggest and stick him in the thigh with a compass point or any sharp object I could get my hands on in a hurry.

“What was that for?” he’d demand, holding his newfound source of agony.

“To stop the pain in your finger,” I’d innocently protest.

“ But now my leg hurts”

“Would you like me to cure that as well?”

 My brother stopped complaining after a while, at least to me. Perhaps he learned something after all.