JAMES DELINGPOLE
Extreme pain, of the purest intensity,
changes everything
prescribed Tramadol going spare. ‘Bosh
one of those on top of the G&Ts and with
any luck, I’ll be in toy town,’ I mused hap-
pily, like the late 1980s rave casualty I’ll
always be at heart. But this was optimistic.
One Tramadol, it turned out, wasn’t nearly
enough. I spent the night writhing on my
bed, wondering whether Durham had a hos-
pital with an A&E, and if so how long I’d
have to wait before they gave me something
proper, like morphine...
Morphine’s great. I wouldn’t necessarily
call it a fun drug in the way that my child-
hood favourite, MDMA, is but there’s areason why medics carry ampoules of it in
combat. It doesn’t kill the pain; it just takes
you to a place where you’re at one remove
from it, so that while you can still feel it
throbbing away, it’s as if someone else is
doing the actual suffering for you.
The downside of morphine though is that
it makes it hard to write or indeed achieve
anything useful. That’s why my brother-in-
law, David Winwood, tries to keep down his
intake. He’s stuck in a wheelchair with a ter-
rible degenerative spine condition which
causes him pain far worse than mine, 24/7.
But because he is a hugely successful paint-
er, much in demand, he has to quite literally
suffer for his art — laying off the best pain-killers, except in extremis, so as not to lose
his artistic mojo or kill his productivity.
It’s in tribute to the heroic David that
I am writing this without painkillers too.
One odd side effect, I notice, is that I haven’t
been checking Twitter every few seconds
like I normally do. Perhaps the stabs of pain
— together with whatever chemicals my
body is producing in its attempts to cope
— are acting as a substitute for the nagging
stimulus of social media.
What I’ve done, the sports physio told
me when I saw him this morning, is I’ve
trapped a nerve somewhere in my spine.
This has the odd effect of making the pain
crop up in all sorts of strange places, down
my arm as far as my fingertips, quite remote
from where the actual trapped nerve is. I
had rather hoped that it would be a ques-
tion of ‘click, crunch, wow that’s better’. But
it doesn’t work like that. I have to wait till
the inflammation becomes less acute, which
could mean several days more misery ahead.
If you have not been put off by the pre-
ceding paragraphs of wheedling self-pity,
you’ll possibly be wondering how such
extreme pain could have appeared out of
nowhere. I did too till I racked my brain and
finally worked out the answer: it was the
result of an incident over a week ago when,
very foolishly and entirely uncharacteristi-
cally, I had attempted some DIY.
This involved trying to screw a screw
into a fence post. It was that simple but even
there I failed. I slipped on a muddy bank,
grabbed the post as I fell and wrenched my
shoulder and neck in the process. I was so
traumatised that not only did I fail to com-
plete the job, but I also lost the cap to the
ratchet screwdriver and one of the multiple
heads, causing the Fawn to mock me greatly
for my risible incompetence.
She’s right. There is a very important
lesson here which I hope she has learned.
Never, ever, ever let your husband perform
DIY tasks beyond his capabilities. Either do
it yourself or pay a handyman to do it, thus
leaving your husband free to engage in less
dangerous pursuits. Fox hunting, say.S
ince my pulmonary embolism a couple
of years ago, I have become something
of a connoisseur of pain. The agony
— a deep ache of the purest intensity — is
caused by the pressure of a blood clot on
the highly sensitive membrane of the lungs.
It’s so exquisite it’s almost a religious expe-
rience. Your world is pain; all you want to
do is to curl into a foetal ball and allow the
earth to swallow you up: anything to make it
stop. Mothers who’ve experienced it tell me
it’s worse than giving birth.
I never wanted to go through such pain
again but this week I nearly did: complete-
ly out of the blue and for no reason I could
think of. One day I was feeling a bit achy in
the upper back; the next it was worse; the
day after that, it hurt so much I almost want-
ed to cry out to my Mummy and beg her to
make it go away.
Unfortunately the last coincided with my
appearance at the Durham Union in a debate
about Brexit. Perhaps in normal circum-
stances, it might have been quite dispiriting
hearing Anna Soubry come on after me and
announce to the audience, in that charming,
winning way she has, how crap my speech was
and how utterly ignorable my opinions were,
given all I’d ever achieved in life (apparent-
ly) was to have ‘once been a Telegraph jour-
nalist’. But on this occasion I couldn’t have
cared less — nor even if we had won or lost.
No doubt the subsequent speeches by my
teammates Peter Lilley and Steven Wolfe
were brilliant, but all I could think of by
that stage was the succession of double gin
and tonics waiting for me in the union bar.
Being students, they don’t do ice and lemon
there, but the prices are low and the ambi-
ance is charmingly scuzzy. Also, being Dur-
ham rather than Oxbridge, there are fewer
social justice warriors lurking to harangue
you as you drown your sorrows. Indeed,
three undergraduates actually congratulat-
ed me on how weirdly compelling my quasi-
hallucinogenic attempt at an argument my
pain-wracked speech had been.
Better still, as luck would have it, some-
body — not a student — had some legally
Th e d own sid e of mor phin e is
that it makes it hard to write or
indeed achieve anything useful‘Every time I wake up it’s Brexit Day.’