SO MUCH PAIN by Polly Howells

I didn’t expect there to be so much pain on this trip. And I’m a little embarrassed by it. One isn’t supposed to take a huge trip to Bhutan and Southeast Asia, seven weeks in all away from home, and come back primarily aware of the pain.

But it’s the truth. There’s the pain in my shoulder, not diagnosed until I returned, last week, as a 50% tear in the supraspinitis tendon of my right rotator cuff. I fell on the street in Brooklyn two weeks before we left. Nothing to do about it then. Don’t know what I’m going to do about it now. Visiting Woodstock Wellness regularly, being cracked and given herbal supplements by the good doctor there. A psychic relief, at least, if nothing else.

But more important was the pain of seeing how people live. Two hours of electricity at night. No hot water, or as in one monastery in Bhutan where we spent three nights, no water at all. Our physical discomfort was one thing, but seeing how people live in so much more physical discomfort, and take it for granted. That hurts. It hurts to see that what we take for granted is a luxury only the very few in this world can afford. Our guide in Siem Reap, where the twelve-hundred-year-old ruins of Angkor Wat rise mysteriously and majestically from the jungle, tells us that it takes his wife all day to cook, going to the market several times because there is no refrigeration.

Cambodia is a cauldron of pain. The first afternoon in Phnom Penh, we are taken to the Torture Museum, where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned the highest echelons of its party and saved for them the most exquisite forms of torture. Cells three feet by six feet, leg irons, cots with no mattresses, little metal boxes for feces. It’s all still there, still there the way the Vietnamese found it when they invaded in 1979, five years after the Khmer Rouge took over.

After that we go to the Killing Fields. There is a glass tower filled with shelves of skulls. There is a field on which slivers of bones are visible. Oddly the trees there are magnificent, tall and twisted, roots and trunks entwined, entangled. There are more butterflies on this field than anywhere else we go. The English doctor we meet the next day pooh poohs the possibility that these creatures are connected with the dead souls there. I don’t cry. I am numb, in awe.

The second day in Phnom Penh we visit the English doctor, the brother of a friend, who runs a hospital that refashions and attaches limbs to people who were disfigured during the Pol Pot years. When he hears that we are therapists, he says, “Oh you might want to visit our Acid Burn Clinic.” So the next day we go out there, some ways out of town, where people whose faces have been burnt off by angry relatives who have got hold of acid – sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, all available with no regulation, sold on street corners – are being treated, physically, emotionally. A nurse is massaging the scars on another woman’s arms when we walk in. A man without eyes, his face totally obscured by scar tissue, plays a piano like Ray Charles. His wife, who threw the acid at him, is so appalled at what she did that she works here as a cook. She serves us our lunch as we talk with the staff about post-traumatic stress disorder. The whole country seems to be suffering from this disease; the resources to treat it so few.

A girl holds a snake for me to buy, for food, on Tonle Sap Lake, not far from Siem Reap. The snake is alive. She is asking two dollars. I don’t buy the snake. But I snap her picture. I look at her now, look at her sad, serious face. Where did she find that snake? My friend went there several years ago, said she saw a girl selling a snake, right there. In the same spot. The same girl? The same snake? A scary thought. Is she a prop?

And then the next morning, Eric, my husband, woke up with the world whirling around inside his head. Couldn’t get his head off the pillow. The doctor came by, diagnosed it as vertigo, probably caused by the anti-malaria medication he was taking. Gave him some pills. I sat with him all day, but it didn’t go away. That night he was carried out of the hotel on a stretcher, down the steps past the swimming pool, carried by around ten small Cambodian men. We spent the night in a “private clinic,” a small hospital with one doctor and one nurse. An IV in Eric’s arm, they are hydrating him and giving him anti vertigo medication, and antibiotics, who knows what all, he sleeps, I do too, a little. There is a bathroom connected to our room in which the sink tap is dripping. The toilet paper is pink. At least there is toilet paper. Eric has been carrying three full rolls around in his suitcase, just in case.

It takes him 36 hours to sit up without the world spinning. One full day after he is admitted we leave the clinic. We go to a show that night, but the next morning he is still a little dizzy. It has now been three or four weeks, the dizziness has finally left, but slowly, oh so slowly.

We go from there to a small town in Laos, a lovely peaceful place, but it is the fall and everyone is burning the refuse in their gardens, and cooking on wood stoves in the street. Despite the physical beauty, when we come out of our room in the morning the air is pungent with wood smoke, hard to take in.

After Laos, we end up in Hong Kong. November 17, the city is completely dressed up for Christmas. Not one tall building without an array of Christmas lights. After three Buddhist countries, this is a shock. We find out that they do this for the mainland Chinese, who come to Hong Kong to shop, and to experience ersatz Christmas, not having it at home.

So many people. I learn later that 57% of the world’s population lives in Asia.
I am not surprised.

When we arrive in San Francisco, and the passport control guy says, “Welcome home folks,” my eyes actually tear up.

New York City feels like a small, peaceful town, even in the Christmas rush.

After a massage and a chiropractic session, I seem to get a cold. The chiropractor of course says, “that’s good, you’re draining.” What I call it, to myself, is “Post-traumatic drip syndrome.” The post nasal drip born of trauma.

Glad to be back.