Filling a Void with Oliver Twist, Vikings and a Good Shepherd

"We are hurt; we are lonely; and we turn to music or words, and as compensation beyond all price we are given glimpses of the world on the other side of time and space."

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

It was domestic, yet highly inconvenient pain. But it was pain, significant and very distressing. 

It started with a pulled muscle in my back. I don’t know how it happened, but I woke one morning not being able to move without searing, debilitating pain in my lower left back. The next day, an old, loyal molar started to tell me, though a mild pain, that something was wrong. Poor thing, it had been drilled and filled by my sadistic childhood dentist (as a rule, he didn’t use Novocain)  3 or 4 times, and it simply could not hold together any longer. 

The pain from my back and tooth peaked the same night. I lay on my camping sleeping mat, on the floor (my bed was too soft for my back), my tooth pulsating excruciating, jabbing, hot pain into my jaw. A menthol patch burned/cooled my back which I think just distracted my nerves, rather than treated the pulled muscle. The only thing that would tame my jaw was a mouthful of ice water swished over the tooth, but the pain would creep back as soon as the water warmed. I was miserable. I slept fitfully, not moving for the pain in my back. 

This happened amid a week of turmoil in my husband’s company which caused him stress and left a lot of people I knew out of work, scrambling for jobs or transplanted abruptly to other positions in other cities, which, in my empathy, did nothing to lessen my turmoil. All the pain and stress started to feel deathlike. I don't like to be over-dramatic, but it felt like pain and distress loomed so large in my circumstances and thoughts that it was forming an irrevocable void in my mental landscape, the same way death does, and it hurt.

The last straw was a small, but persistent dry-skin crack in my thumb (like a cut, but heals much slower), which when brushed lightly, produced a disproportionately intense pain. 

I spent half a day hurting, trying without much success to rest my body and regain my presence of mind. I felt as if I were flailing mentally, lost in the pain. Then I asked myself, "What do you do to cope with stress? Remember? Yes." 

Story. Music. Loud music, long stories. 

If menthol back patches and ice water could distract my nerves from driving me mad with pain, story and music (which is a form of story) could distract my mind from the pain. 

When you want to be distracted from first-world pain and stress, and get a wider, more realistic picture of your life in the big, wide world, the best author I can suggest is Charles Dickens (or Dostoyevsky). You think you have problems? You don’t have problems like Oliver Twist had problems, or David Copperfield, or Miss Havisham (Great Expectations) or Lady Dedlock (Bleak House). And his stories are looong. I downloaded Oliver Twist from librivox.org, all 17 1/2 hours of it (the readers of versions four or six are especially good) and started into a journey into mid-19th century London’s treatment of orphans. My life and situation looked 110% better in only a few chapters. 

When not blasting my mind with music or aurally soaking in the trials and pains of poor little Oliver Twist, I sat down with the tome, Sagas of the Icelanders. I was half way through “Egil’s Saga,” but was already getting a good idea about Viking life. A handful of Norwegian Vikings quarreled with King Harald (not Harald Bluetooth, but Harald the Tanglehair, later changed to Fairhair when he combed and cut his locks) and decided to strike out on their own and live in Iceland.  

Although Christianized (the babies were “sprinkled with water” at birth), these Vikings had trouble with some of the more obvious Christian ideals, particularly in the areas of theft and murder. They were often described as large, brutal, violent men, who, when they grew bored with their farms, went out pillaging. It’s how they got their wealth: they stole it from small villages in northern Europe and the United Kingdom, and sometimes killed those they stole from. And they thought nothing of killing another person in return for a social faux pas or insult. What did I gain from this perspective? Well, as far as I can tell, Viking-like shenanigans are punishable by law these days and I am mighty glad I didn’t live in the Viking era because fate would have it that I would undoubtedly be born into a pillagee family, not a pillager.  

When the brutality and murderous lifestyle of these ancient figures grew tiresome, I  turned to The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson, an Icelandic author. This story was not about murderous Vikings, but an Icelandic shepherd who, despite cold, winter storms and strife, persevered on his yearly Christmas journey to find and return all the sheep that hadn’t returned to the farms in the fall and were lost in the mountains.  His perseverance and toughness was infectious and helped me to focus on the end of my pain journey. 

I still hurt, I still empathized with my husband and the people who lost their jobs/positions, but the world seemed a bigger place, I could see and feel more than just my pain and my circumstances, and I was able to put my life and my minuscule sufferings in perspective. I felt better. 

But medicine helps, too. The dentist suspected a cracked tooth, advised full-strength, around the clock NSAIDS, and  referred me to an endodontist. The NSAIDS dulled my tooth pain (though didn’t take it all away) and soothed my back pain. I re-entered my routine with a refreshing perspective and a little more mental strength than before. The void was filled, pain and loss no longer racked my thoughts. 

The endodontist said the tooth could not be saved, put me on antibiotics for the infection and now I have an appointment to have it taken out (before it gets infected again). Though I am undecided as to whether I want to fill the void in my mouth with an artificial tooth, I know what I’m going to do to gain perspective over the pain when they pull it.