What’s your pain on a scale of 1-10?

It doesn’t look too high. Come on John, you can do it. You’ve ridden mountain bikes for years.

Pedal, anticipate, maximum speed body weight forward– and jump.

Except I lose the bike.

And I drop like a lead balloon.

 

The pain. In my backside. My back. My legs.

The crack. By back has just broken in two.

As my screams subside, I can’t breathe.

I’m holding my best friend’s hand (which in retrospect is kind of weird!)

The pain is sooo intense.

Minutes pass.

I can’t feel my feet.

My medical brain kicks in – ‘at least I’ve had 3 kids’ I muse.

But I’ve just snapped my back. What sort of dad will I be in a wheelchair?

 

4 hours later and I finally get to hospital.

‘What’s your pain on a scale of 1-10?’ asks the nurse.

22! I think, but all I can do is sob through the pain.

Some morphine. Then some more. Before finally the pain subsides.

My pain score has been re-set.

What used to be a 10 is now a 5.

And I have a new-found respect for my wife (I thought she was a wuss for wanting more than Entanox in labour – oh the shame!)

As I lay in hospital for those 3 days I was repeatedly asked to score my pain.

Were the nurses that bothered? Did they feel that pain with me? Did anyone care as I lay there in the night?

It didn’t seem like it...

And then I’m home.

And Nepal happens. Over 4000 dead. A nation in pain.

My Facebook page tells me there are 2.5 million child sex slaves in the world.
I know that every minute 15 children die from preventable diseases.
On my very road there are lonely, depressed, suicidal, beaten, chronically abused people.

And I ask myself:

What pain do I feel on a scale of 1-10?

Do I really care about their suffering?

Or am I indifferent?

The girl on my ward at work, with a recurrence of a brain tumour and little hope of a cure.

What pain do I feel on a scale of 1-10?

Do I really care about her suffering?

Or am I indifferent?

When I started medicine my pain and empathy levels were high.

I would be affected. Moved. Angry.
I would feel the pain.

But my pain score has been re-set.

And not in a good way

What was a 10 is now a 5.What was a 7 is now a 1.

And I sometimes barely flinch. I am indifferent.

What will it take for me to feel their pain? Not to feel empathy as I am taught at med school. But to enter into that pain in true compassion?

What will it take for me to be angry, angry enough to get off my backside and give, go, campaign - rather than sit apathetically and wait for someone else to take the lead?

What will make me desperate enough to pray for the comfort of God, for true healing and restoration?

The only way to keep my pain score attuned is to focus daily on the most painful, unjust event in all of history.

As I gaze at the cross, the agony that Christ went through for me – as I see how wide and deep and high and long his love was that took him there – where there was no morphine, no diazepam, no-one to hold his hand – it is there that I am captivated again by his love for me.

It is there that I see him hurting for the girl on my ward, hurting for each of these dear Nepalese. Hurting for my neighbours. Hurting for my patients.

He understands.

Because he’s been off the pain scale, he has compassion for those who despair.

Oh God, re-set our pain score and help us to enter into and feel and journey through the pain with those who are hurting and show them Jesus, the God of comfort, who comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort those in trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

 

 

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