POSTCARD #242: New Delhi: Early afternoon flight yesterday, from Ch’mai to Bangkok gets in around 2pm, and Jiab was waiting for me at Arrivals. She had travelled up from the south that same morning. So we go by taxi into town, planning to get there for the 4pm appointment at a central Bangkok hospital to have the needle in the scalp, right occipital nerve (PHN nerve block treatment).
Clear road, all the way in, elevated highway, seemingly afloat without support, and pointing in a line between these tall skinny glass/steel buildings on either side, reaching up into the sky from foundations somewhere down below – a futuristic sci-fi city perspective image drawn with straight road penetrating into the urban landscape reducing down to a single vanishing point. Our exit comes up about 45 minutes into the drive, and the outside lane slopes off down into the shadowy gloom of street level – traffic yes, but no hold up at all. Good, it’s that time of day when lunch hour is finished and school-pick-up traffic not yet begun.
Suddenly we’re in town and what struck me was, so many people wearing black. Everywhere… you could say the entire population was dressed like this. I’d forgotten the country is in mourning. TV announcers wear black, the backgrounds against which they sit are in shades of black. Blackness is a tangible thing, a world devoid of color, now into the third month since the death of their exceptional King.
The city functions as it normally does and for us, a clear pathway opens up through traffic, green lights all the way. Into narrower streets, and narrower still, then the one-way urban lane (soi) network, typical of Asian cities, with minimum clearance between walls on either side for cars and motorbikes traveling at high speed.
The acceleration and rapid gear change sounds, insistent GPS voice on the driver’s phone in Thai and on Jiab’s iPad in English, overlapping each other, causing them to have to shout to be heard – identifying the turnings to take, no, not this one, the next one the urgency and confusion of it was exactly the wrong thing for my headache. But we’re there in no time, arriving at the place exactly 4pm.
Tumble out of the taxi, along the corridor, into the small neurology/pain management outpatients, and my name is called just then, as if I’d been sitting in the waiting room for half an hour. Good to not have that nervous anticipation of worrying as the clock ticks on. So I get up on the gurney and into the lying-down position, left side, with head on pillow. The nurse pulls curtain: shweesh, all the way round: shweesh, Doc is saying; now you may feel a little pain here. Needle slides in… the initial shock of it is astonishing, barely a hair’s width, narrow-gauge hypodermic, and I’m aware of pressure; he’s pushing it around, trying to get the nerve, then the time it takes to void the syringe. Everything moves up a notch, jaw clench, rigid body and holding in the mind – is this what hell is like? Immediately the small ‘self’ leaves the body. A voice says now take a deep breath, and the needle comes out.
The ease of the anesthetic kicks in immediately. Euphoria and laughter, the silliness of rubbery knees articulating legs, and shock of feet unexpectedly impacting with floor as we walk along the corridor and wait there for a while. It’s over; I’m folded into another taxi home, and must have slept all the way through. Awake again at 3 am for the first flight over here to New Delhi. Anesthetic has worn off by this time and there’s the pain of the bruise where the needle went in and I don’t remember much about that journey, only later I realized the headache came along too.
One good thing is I’m getting nearer to an acceptance of it; the actual pain, and what I make of it, are two different things. At the start, September 2015, all the doctors I spoke with said it would get better after a year, and when you pass the 5-year milestone, it would be much easier. The sort of thing prisoners doing a life sentence might depend on, I thought at the time. But it is true – hectic it may be, I can see in the interval of time passed, the headache seems to be not as bad as it was, because there’s no memory of what life was like without it.
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me, “How good, how good does it feel to be free?” And I answer them most mysteriously, “Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?” [Bob Dylan, Ballad in Plain D]
dhamma footsteps 
May you find relief from your pain and may your headaches dissipate into nothingness.. wishing you much health for this and coming years.
I’ll be spending a few days in Bangkok (med checkup, friend visits, street food & vegan delights, etc) end of March, so thanks for the reminder of BLACK!
Thanks for these kind thoughts, I’m reasonably sure it’ll be like this. I’ll be in Bangkok again in early March, so it looks like we will just miss each other, pity because I’d like to know about your forays into street food & vegan delights – even though it’s against a black background.
My top recommendation for vegan food would be Cafe Bonita Social Club in Silom. My (now-) friends K and Neung run the place.. BEST vegan food in all of BKK 😉
Sounds great, I’ll try it next time I’m there. For any readers interested, here’s a link: Cafe Bonita Silom, Bangkok
‘Ask the snail beneath the stone/Ask the stone beneath the wall/Are there any stars at all/Like an eagle in the sky/Tell me if air is strong…’ (Robin Williamson – Waltz of the New Moon)
So I did, I asked, and the search brought me back nearly half a century… can it be so long ago? Tipped over the edge to where the metaphor is, actually, what it’s saying it is (or thought to be). Now it’s that many decades later, 6.30 am in the cold darkness of a Delhi morning and I’m humming along with the waltz listening for the words which, for some reason, I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, or I’ve forgotten, and a part of me that got lost, the missing piece, is found. Thanks for pointing me in the direction.
Had a feeling you’d know that one… glad you found what was missing…
Yes, so good. These days I’m finding this kind of thing more and more; a sort of returning…
The life course is not a straight line, more a spiral…
I’ve started to see it in the way we understand fractals…
Yes, a fractal is probably better…
“the chains of the skyway”
Indeed.
What else could it be, trapped in the skyways? Reminds me of something, somewhere about how fish can’t see the water they swim in…
Yes I think I vaguely recall that too, but couldn’t pinpoint it.
I think I had it in one of my quotes, let me try a search…
Found it: ‘Like fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world.’ [David Loy, The World is Made of Stories]
I may have come across this at https://mindfulbalance.org, a site I think you might find worth “follow”ing.
It’s a good site. I was a follower for a year or two at the beginning of blogging but had to economize on ‘following’ due to the time I spend on replying to comments, stimulating discussion, and this is how it is here. And I never had any reply from comments I left there, neither was there any interest in what we are doing over here, so I always used to be interested in it but in the end, space had to be made for other more interactive blogs. Besides the quote, I remember now, comes from my book ‘The World Is Made of Stories’ [David R. Loy]
Yes. I could have guessed you would be aware of that site. I certainly appreciate what you say. I prune my “Follow” list from time to time for similar reasons. And thanks for looking out the source of the quotation.
Having to get everything down to a manageable size means arriving at a kind of minimalism where every word is chosen.
Okay.
Ah, for the moment when the anesthesia kicks in and the pain is gone. One might very well get addicted to that moment. But, oh, to have all this pain with the needle and injection and then to still have the headache seems a cruel twist of fate. To say nothing of having to function with it all of the time. I totally sympathize as one with VERY frequent migraines. Even when the pain subsides there is the toll pain takes on the body constantly to be in pain. Hoping that perhaps the shot will have a delayed reaction and steal the pain away yet.
The shot needs to work straight away, no delayed action, but I do like the idea that it would steal the pain away 🙂 I have to accept that it’s not going to happen, this is it, this is what I have to be going on with. I heard from a PHN sufferer with the same pain I have, in the head. He’s had it for 26 years, says it gradually gets better. So I’ll have to wait and see. Gradually come round to having it as part of my life…
Thinking of you Tiramit – with a hug!
Thanks Jude