I’m learning that pain is strange stuff.

If I bump my knee against the corner of the coffee table, it hurts very very badly. I jump up and down, and say several very rude words, very loudly.

But it’s not distressing. I think that’s because I can look to the past and see an apparent cause-and-effect: my knee hurts because I hit the coffee table. And I can look to the future and know, based on past similar experience, that the pain will be gone in a moment, even if the bruise lasts a week or more.

Recently I’ve discovered an entirely different kind of pain. It doesn’t hurt much. Many orders of magnitude less painful than knee-hits-coffee-table pain. Less painful than a mild headache that I would not treat with a painkiller. So we’re talking low-level pain.

The pain itself is not distressing. Consciously, I don’t really know what’s causing the pain. Probably some damned tumour pushing up against some bit of my insides that don’t want to be pushed around, but I don’t have a direct cause-and-effect as I did in knee-meets-coffee-table. And, I have no idea when it will go away. So that’s a little worrying, compared with the knee-and-coffee-table.

But the brain doesn’t like this minor pain at all.

After two or three days of low-level pain, I feel ground down, worn out, exhausted by it. By day it’s hard to concentrate on work; by night it’s hard to get to sleep. It’s as if the brain allocates a substantial portion of itself to monitor, and report on, this mild pain. And there’s not enough brain space left over for ordinary living.

I was brought up, like so many of us, to tough it out, and to take as few medicines as possible. I’m slowly overcoming that and following the doctors’ and nurses’ instructions about taking pain relief. It makes a big difference to everyday life. But it still seems strange to take pain relief for such mild pain.