Jeremiah’s pain

Jeremiah was a man more of faith than of religion, and he believed — without being able to explain why — that God first made an inert form of clay, empty and immoral, and only afterwards breathed life (read: a soul) into that creature.

Jeremiah sometimes felt guilty for not having had, in his life, great hardships that he could later recount with glory and rejoicing. The truth is that his childhood and adolescence had been neither hard nor easy. He was middle class: he had none of the luxuries of the rich, nor did he go through the hardships of the poor. This was something that truly bothered him: being middling. Once adolescence was behind him, Jeremiah got rich “by hitching a ride,” as he liked to say: he became a partner in his best college friend’s company, and the venture had been wonderfully successful. To make the analogy fairer, let us say that Jeremiah got rich by hitching a ride, but in an old Beetle falling to pieces, which he himself often had to fix, swap parts on and push when the engine stalled.

The fact is that, today, he was already a rich man and enjoyed good health.

Jeremiah’s life was excessively perfect — too good, even, as the old folks would say. He had money, lived in a penthouse on the good stretch of the Florianópolis waterfront, had a sports car and a motorcycle — a hobby he greatly enjoyed — in the garage; he had a good marriage, though so far without children, a reasonable body, he was not ugly, and he had living parents who loved him. He had everything. He lacked only excitement. He was apathetic, even with all of that.

Though he was not religious, one night, lying down, instead of mumbling vague thanks and falling asleep before he could say amen, Jeremiah made a special request: he begged God to give his life some excitement.

Jeremiah went days and days without any answer and ended up forgetting the wish. Business was good, his company was expanding, and he even felt happy to be more and more a part of it, and it of him. He planned to have children with his wife. He went so far as to visit a BMW dealership to trade his car for an even better one.

The days went by, indeed.

At a memorable meeting, after a stressful week in which he had not managed to eat properly or to set aside any time for himself, Jeremiah felt unwell at the end of some conversation or other and excused himself from the other partners. He went to his office, locked the door, sat in his comfortable brown leather armchair and set about understanding himself better. After a few moments, he realized that what he really needed was to move his bowels. He went to the office’s private washroom, locked that door too — irrationally — sat on the toilet without noticing the funny padded sound the seat made, and waited. He waited longer than he usually waited. In fact, he had to wait so long that he began to strain, in order at last to glimpse the imminence of the evacuation.

And lo, as soon as the act began, Jeremiah felt a searing pain in his anal region! He had never felt such pain, though it lasted only a brief instant: once the evacuation was over, he felt nothing more. Nothing.

He was frightened by what had happened, but since the pain went away instantly, he chose not to see a doctor right away, to spare himself the embarrassment of telling the story.

Curiously, in his following evacuations Jeremiah felt similar pains, sometimes more, sometimes less intense. After some thirty days, he finally decided to go to a specialist and tell him about his intimate drama. And he told him. And the doctor — experienced as he was — pronounced the diagnosis even before examining him: it was a case of anal fissure.

An anal fissure is nothing more than a small wound, of surprising power to hurt, in the lining of the anus — like those sores that appear at the corner of the mouth on cold days and hurt every time you yawn — and it is slow to heal. Some heal; others become perpetual.

As luck would have it, Jeremiah’s anal fissure became chronic.

Ah! What suffering each evacuation was! And what a biologically bizarre thing an anal fissure was: a human being feeling a searing, unbearable pain that is nonetheless too quick to be borne, yet comes with each and every evacuation and seems impossible to soothe.

How miserable his life now was.

Jeremiah still had everything: money, worldly comfort and a good marriage. Jeremiah had everything for practically the whole day. But none of it mattered during the minute or two, every blessed day, that his ordeal lasted. Jeremiah would succumb, inevitably and daily, to the searing pain his affliction caused him.

Jeremiah was well-off, after all. He sought the proper help and consulted the most diverse and renowned proctologists, who always gave the same diagnosis after touching him with fingers of various sizes. The fissure had become chronic, and the prognosis was none other than that it would last forever.

What could Jeremiah do, then? Nothing, it seemed.

One day, around four in the afternoon, in a moment of sun and breeze, Jeremiah was sitting on the balcony of his luxurious apartment, admiring the immensity of the sea before him. The sun fell only on his bare feet, but the cool, salt-scented breeze touched his half-naked body all over. In front of him was a coffee table, on which he had set down the key to the new car and the wallet that hid a black card and an old-fashioned passport photo of his wife, a few months younger than she was that day. Ah! How good and beautiful life was there, in each of its flowery details.

Every five or six minutes, however, his intestinal peristalsis reminded him that the hour of anguish was approaching. Jeremiah writhed, sweating, for about thirty seconds, and then enjoyed another five or six minutes of peace and serenity.

In the end, though, biology won, and he got up and went to the bathroom.

Perhaps because of how long he had held it in, this time Jeremiah felt — truly — the worst pain of his entire life. He felt as though he had been stabbed, slowly and stiffly, in his most intimate region, and the feeling was confirmed by the scarlet ink that now stained the sumptuous porcelain of the toilet. For the first time since the diagnosis, the man wept from pain. He lay down on the floor, motionless, curled up like a fetus, and stayed that way for ten, fifteen or twenty minutes. The physical pain had already passed, of course. But the emotional pain had not.

He quarreled with God. He even mumbled that he would give his soul not to have to go through that again.

And he stayed there.

Noticing her husband was missing, his wife eventually found him, frail, in the bathroom, where Jeremiah lay cold and catatonic on a fluffy rug bought at a craft fair nearby.

Despite the money — and the good health insurance — they had, the first emergency room the two of them found was a public one and, it must be said, a rather neglected one.

They went in and promptly checked in at the dump.

Jeremiah was seen after only about twenty minutes of waiting. The doctor looked freshly graduated, because she cared a great deal about the patient and asked questions far too delicate for the place they were in. She was, however, moved by the case and, though she did not know much about proctology — as she herself admitted, inadvertently but good-humoredly — she took care to give him the phone number of a former preceptor from medical school, whom the young doctor considered the best and most devoted proctologist she had ever known.

Jeremiah was also given a rather painful intramuscular antipsychotic and, within a few hours, was feeling better.

He thanked the staff, gave his wife his arm and went home to sleep.

On waking the next day, he immediately phoned the recommended doctor, as if in a last breath of hope, and booked an appointment — paying twice the asking price — for that same day, so as not to wait for next week’s opening. He went to the office by taxi, because he still thought himself too drowsy to drive.

At the clinic he was seen by a charismatic chubby man, whose golden whiskers above the mustache gave away a lifetime of heavy smoking. After a brief consultation and yet another rectal exam, the doctor promised an innovative treatment for Jeremiah’s problem: a simple surgery and a few days of an ointment with a difficult name, mostly used for warts. Iquiminon? Imiquimol? Quimininol? Jeremiah could not memorize the name, but he trusted the rotund gentleman. He took the earliest date possible and booked the procedure.

A few days but many pains later, Jeremiah went to a charming but quite small private hospital to have the surgery done. Surprisingly, the procedure went smoothly and quickly and, to his concern, a few hours after the operation he felt the urge to go. He was seized by a raw, vile dread that took on the whole definition of the concept of real and was lodged deep in Jeremiah’s soul. He went to the toilet afraid. His skin was sweating, his flesh was cold. His hands, trembling. His heart, pounding.

He thought about holding it in, but he went. He went and felt some discomfort, but he felt no pain.

And over the following weeks he stopped feeling even the anal nuisance the procedure had caused.

He could once again relieve himself without distress, and his life went back to normal.

Jeremiah was more a man of faith than a man of religion.

Sitting once more on his balcony, contemplating the sea, now rough from the combination of a full moon and the end of autumn, Jeremiah suddenly remembered the day he had wept, curled up on his apartment’s bathroom floor, and, who knows why, he also remembered saying that he would give his soul to be rid of that problem. Well, he was free at last of his chronic, infinite and untreatable fissure, which had been miraculously resolved by some ordinary doctor with a cheap consultation fee, and not by the very expensive specialists he used to see.

Had it really been the corpulent doctor and the magic ointment that cured him?

Jeremiah now set about picking apart the events of his life! He had asked God for excitement and he had gotten excitement. Bad excitement, but excitement. He had said he would give his soul for the cure, and then he had been cured. Had he, then, lost his own soul in exchange for not feeling pain while answering the call of nature?

That thought tormented Jeremiah to the end of his days.

He had, after all, a second half of life as good as the first. He had children and raised them well. He remained well-off. His wife was indeed the love of his life, and he the love of hers. He lived.

Jeremiah ended up dying of an almost sudden heart failure, brought on by a little chest pain that bothered him for three days before a well-read cardiologist could tell him it was in fact a heart attack. This was at eighty, perhaps. He was already old and thought that, at his age, he pretty much ought to die anyway. He had lived well until then, and that was more than he believed, deep down, he deserved.

The day before he actually passed, the by-then old Jeremiah once again felt that indescribable fear he used to feel when he had to go, back in the days of the fissure.

The fear now had another cause. Jeremiah felt in his flesh that this life was about to end and that soon he would be made to venture into the after. He was seized with dread when he imagined he might go to some hell for having bargained away his soul in exchange for anal health.

Jeremiah died happy for the life he had had, but worried about the life he had not.

Little did he know, however, that in his own belief — which is the only one that truly matters — his soul was not even his to bargain with. It was God who breathed it into his body of clay, and to Him it would return once the body was done.