The Punishment Is Cure, and the Cure Is Punishment :: In Corpore Sano Presents Jen Soriano
An essay excerpt and ephemeral medical images from writer Jen Soriano
From writer and musician Jen Soriano, an excerpt from her Pushcart-nominated lyric essay “A Brief History of Her Pain,” which intertwines the story of the author’s pursuit of pain relief with that of millennia of treatments for women’s illnesses. Accompanying the excerpt are diagnostic images from some of the medical tests Soriano underwent in her attempts to get to the root of more than a decade of symptoms.
From her practice statement: “I cannot explain my body to people in daily life. My body can only be explained on the page. The fragments of it. The fire of it. The topography of isolation and despair in it. I have tried to say these words in conversation, and have been met with confusion and disbelief, and sometimes a mocking smirk. How could a body that looks so able feel what you are claiming to feel? The conditions I manage are invisible. Central Sensitivity Syndrome, PTSD, chronic pain and fatigue. They are invisible, but they are loud. They insist I write about them because they are a prism through which to see a radical reorganizing of our world.”
Expanded and additional work from Soriano appears in the forthcoming initial print volume of In Corpore Sano.
A Brief History of Her Pain
1996 AD
Jennifer S. Asian. Nineteen years of age. Junior. Clinic visit due to pain “like lead shooting through arms.” Average build, average height, flat affect. She clenched then twisted her fists, repeated, as if juicing two lemons till dry.
Jennifer S. received standard procedure for cases like this. The Wartenburg wheel: steel teeth rolled across inner forearms and palms to assess nerve response. The tomahawk hammer struck against wrists, knees, and elbows to elicit deep tendon reflexes. Posture examined as well as muscle strength. Mental examination waived by the attending practitioner.
Results: no nerve damage detected by Wartenburg wheel. No delay in deep tendon reflexes elicited by tomahawk hammer. Patient status: Normal. Slumped posture. Weak grip. Pain likely due to overreaction to college stress.
Jennifer S. sent home with naproxen, medical report, reminder to schedule a pap smear. Patient exited the clinic with difficulty, shoulders caved and arms cradled, as if nursing a porcelain baby.
1800 BC
In Egypt, the Kahun Papyrus is written — a text entirely focused on women’s health. This ancient text becomes the first comprehensive medical document known to man.
The Papyrus mentions a condition of mysterious pain and mercurial emotional states lacking apparent physical cause. This is what will later become known as hysteria. It also reveals that though seemingly mysterious, the condition does indeed have a physical source, and it is none other than a dislocated or starved uterus.
To treat the condition, sweet oils must be applied to the vagina, or unpleasant things must be eaten to lure the misbehaving womb back into place.
The Kahun Papyrus may not only be the first medical text known to man, it may also be the first text written by women. The authors may have been priestesses, since healing was within the domain of spiritual leaders. But being women, these priestesses may have also had misplaced wombs, and therefore may have also been physically pained, emotionally disordered, and hysterical.
2013 AD
I am waiting patiently for the doctor to say something. She moves her reading glasses to the precipice of her nose and examines the grey film at arm’s length. Silence. She shifts in her chair, flicks her hands so the film goes thwack, and moves it up toward a sickly florescent light.
“Your uterus is tipped,” she finally says. “And see this?” She points her pen at a cloudy curved line. “That’s your fallopian tube. But where is your ovary? It must be hiding behind your uterus. And see the other one? The other tube is like a slinky.”
My husband looks at me like he’s afraid I might faint. Instead, I bow my head to suppress a chuckle. Leave it to the fertility doctor to discover what I had long suspected: something was amiss in my womb.
I smile because it’s amusing to learn there is so much interesting activity down there, the fallopian tubes contorting like acrobats, the ovaries and the uterus playing hide-and-seek. I am entertained by the thought of my reproductive organs performing a three-ring circus, since that area of my body — the life-giving viscera, the motherly matrix of me — has always felt comatose, near dead.
Diagnosis: Hystera tipped
to hear water bone ancestors’
sobs buried, alive.
2002 AD
Jennifer S., twenty-six years old, Philippina. First visit. First time in therapy. Presents as anxious. Used entire box of tissue. Complained of pain in arms, back, neck. “Debilitating.” Asked her about childhood. Silence. Mentioned silence multiple times. Two older brothers.
Offered her framework of taboos. Common in Asian cultures. At mention, Jennifer S. became animated, articulate. “I didn’t pay for an anthropologist. Plus, you’re wrong.” Probed possibility of sexual abuse. Patient claimed relationship with brothers was positive. “One of the best parts of childhood.” Defensive affect. Gave her article on breathing techniques for pain. Patient left crying. Anger issues.
June 12 — Jennifer S. canceled appointment. Claimed therapy “made her feel more hysterical.”
200 AD
The Roman physician Galen clarifies the connection between hysteria and women’s body parts. Centuries before him, Hippocrates reaffirmed the Kahun Papyrus by diagnosing emotionally erratic behavior as a disease caused by the migratory womb. Hippocrates elaborated by explaining that hysterics’ wombs have a tendency to move upward, crowding the organs and causing, as one might imagine, all sorts of problems.
Galen agrees to this womb thing, but disagrees on the nature of its errors. Hysteria is not due to the uterus’ itinerant movement, but to its unfortunate ability to retain blood and also female sperm.
The treatment? Not as unfortunate: pelvic massage, sexual stimulation, and release — better known as orgasm. So begins a millennium-long heyday of treating hysteria through sexual healing.
2006 AD
I am sitting on an examination table swinging my legs while yet another doctor asks the requisite questions.
“How long have you had this pain?” She looks squinty-eyed, like she is having trouble seeing me, though I am only two feet away.
“More than ten years,” I reply. “What caused it?” “I don’t know. I’m hoping you can tell me.” “What makes it better?” “Muscle relaxers. Moderate exercise. Sex,” I say. The doctor looks at me sharply, and I think disapprovingly, like a nun. I have overestimated the amount of camaraderie we would have as two relatively young women of color.
“I’ve read about JFK and back pain,” I prattle on. “And about how he was addicted to sex because dopamine helped ease the pain.”
Her head jerks up and she asks, “Have you ever been on opioids?” “No. Other doctors say they wouldn’t help my pain, but sometimes I wonder.” “Hm,” she nods, presumably relieved I am not an opioid addict. “Oh, and I have a sharp burning pain in my abdomen and have to pee all the time,” I recite. I’ve rehearsed this line with a doctor friend who says these are the magic words that will get me an MRI, one of the few diagnostic tests I have not done.
The doctor pops her head up to look at me sharply for a third time, her eyes nearly pinched closed, as if she’s hoping I’ll disappear. I wonder if this is a tic of hers and if she might be a bit hysterical herself.
She reaches over to palpate my belly. Perhaps she’s checking to see if my organs are all in place.
“Ow,” I remember to say after a brief pause. My performance is unconvincing. She sends me home with a diagnosis of “Unexplained chronic pain” and a bottle of Trazodone. An antidepressant. A mild sleep aid. To me, the text on the bottle screams “go to sleep and shut up!”
I go home to my boyfriend Mark and pop a Trazodone like a tic tac. The effect is pleasant, and I have a drowsy memory of his chest bending and blurring above me as we have that familiar slow, sweet, sweaty sex that stretches out like saltwater taffy.
Mark and I have had sex nearly every night since we started dating. For the past two years, sex has been our chosen form of communication. And so, unlike most of my female friends who date men and want something more, I don’t struggle with boyfriend communication, because we don’t attach much importance to talking. Also unlike most of my female friends, I am even more emotionally impermeable than your average dude. Who wants to plumb the depths of feelings when, uncaged, they could eat you alive? Better to pet what’s on the surface where it is safer and much more fun.
Together Mark and I move like cats, independent and tactile and self-serving. We palm limestone and soak in sulfur pools. We fall asleep with limbs intertwined and wake stroking hairs on naked forearms and calves. This sensuous and silent way of being is a temporary balm to my pain.
Diagnosis:
2003 AD
New patient: Jennifer Soriano. Twenty-seven-year-old Filipina woman. Non-profit employee. Second time seeking therapy. Cites history of depression. Previously unable to find suitable therapist. Last therapist (Susan X.) offended patient with theories of Asian heritage and adjustment challenges, suggestion of sexual abuse with no basis.
Jennifer complains of persistent pain in sacrum, arms, neck. Excerpt from journal, which she brought to first session:
I feel crazy. The pain is becoming me. It is taking over me like smoke subsumes a room on fire. So I laugh because what else can I do. My head shakes left and right, involuntarily as if I’m saying no to something inconceivable. My ankle twitches, my pelvic bone cracks, I swallow a rising howl. I shake my head and fix my face. I prepare myself for another day of pretending to be good.
Pain may be classically psychosomatic, emotionally based, physically experienced, real and intertwined with mind-body. Says she hears voices. None urge her to cause harm. Voices say variations of no, express anger, ask questions. To explore: mother wound, focusing therapies, teddy bear technique.
1350 AD
For centuries now, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans have been treating hysteria as a problem of the misbehaved womb. Treatments have ranged from sweet oil application to prescriptions of sweeter sexual release.
Christianity changes everything. With the spread of Christianity and Catholicism through Europe, a more, shall we say, holistic, diagnosis is unleashed: a misbehaved womb is just one part of a whole unholy, transgressive woman.
Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas marries hysteria with evil, and the sick woman witch is born. He concluded that because of weakness, women are more prone to temptation from the Devil, one result of which is the curse of hysteria. To top it off, St. Thomas declares that all unstudied women who practice healing of any kind are minions of the Devil himself.
The punishment is cure, and the cure is punishment: exorcism.
2001 AD
To this day I wonder what happened to her. I don’t remember her name, but she had brown hair, long like her willow-branch arms, and the slinky bearings of a catwalk model. I was assigned to her after shuffling desperately into a neighborhood healing studio in search of immediate pain relief. I don’t remember much about the quality of her massage. But I do remember that toward the end she asked if she could share something; she had heard a word emanating from my left shoulder.
“It’s a word I never use,” she said. “I don’t even know what it means.” “What is it?” I asked. “Remorse,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you?” As the word left her lips the same sound arose from my left hip. “Remorse,” I repeated. “Yes, actually, it does mean something.”
“Well, whatever it means, remorse runs through your shoulder.” Remorse runs through my shoulder! What a poetic way, I thought, to describe the draconian pain that has seized that piece of my body for years.
I’m Sorry! often rings through my left side. How Dare You! often echoes through the right. I don’t remember when I began to hear the voices, but I think they came as I started to heal.
I was stunned that this willowy woman could somehow “hear” these reverberations, and interpret them to the point of uttering a word she didn’t understand. Maybe I wasn’t crazy after all. Or at least, maybe I wasn’t alone in my madness.
Later, she tapped my forehead with her pointer finger, then backed away from the table with her head down, an intense look of focus on her face.
“There were two purple orbs on your right side, and now they are surrounding your whole body,” she said, still looking down. “I’m supposed to tell you that it is enough, that it is enough to support you.”
As she pronounced this, my eyes grew wet with tears. Support and protection — these were nice ideas. As in, they seemed to be nice things to have. Some of my body pain, I had come to believe, arose from living in a perpetual state of bracing in self-support, for want of external protection. I wanted to say this to her. I wanted to affirm whatever and whomever she was channeling. Instead, I simply asked, “Do you always see things when you give massages?”
“Not always.” She returned to the table, her hands hovering inches above my left shoulder. “But it’s something that runs in my family. My mother used to say ‘get the phone,’ and five seconds later the phone would ring.”
In retrospect I wonder if her witchly powers forewarned her of what was to come. A few weeks later, I arrived at our next session eager to ask more about the purple orbs and remorseful shoulder. But she never made it. On the way to the studio her bike hit a car, or a car hit her bike, I’m not sure which. I just know she had an accident, which she supposedly walked away from, but I never saw her again.
Diagnosis: Thorny vine thick
insisting original sin — no,
sorry. Let me begin again.
“A Brief History of Her Pain” was originally published in Waxwing, Issue X, Fall 2016.
Jen Soriano is a Filipinx-American writer whose work blurs the boundaries between literary nonfiction and poetry. Her essays have appeared in Waxwing, Pleiades, Assay, TAYO Literary Magazine and other journals, and her lyric essay “A Brief History of her Pain” was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook manuscript, Making the Tongue Dry, was a finalist for the 2018 Newfound Prose Prize and the Cutbank and Gazing Grain chapbook contests. Jen holds an MFA from Rainier Writing Workshop and lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
IN CORPORE SANO: Creative Practice and the Challenged* Body, is a transdisciplinary collection and conversation by, on, and for bodies-against-within-despite, in the form of an ongoing web series and a forthcoming print:document series (preorder a copy here!). If you’d like to be a part of ICS, rolling submissions for the project are once again open.
With thanks to managing editor and lead facilitator Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson].
