Out of options, I joined the other no-hopers at Mayo’s pain rehabilitation center.  There, chronic pain, unlike the acute variety, was treated as a malfunction in perception, whether or not an ongoing physical cause had been identified.  The brain becomes addicted to dramatizing pain, they said; and the more you feed it, the stronger the addiction.  So don’t dwell on the pain, and don’t try to fix it — no props, no pills.  Eventually the mind should let go. 

I was skeptical at first.  But the more I learned about chronic pain, the more sense it made.  Studies have shown, for example, that people can develop a general hypersensitivity to pain after an injury — a condition called central sensitization — that can persist long after the injury has healed.  Other research demonstrates that the neural activity triggered by a given physical stimulus can vary greatly among individuals; what some find unbearable, others register as only a mild annoyance. “ Pain is an interpretation by the brain,” explained Dr. Wesley Gilliam, the center’s clinical director. 

For me, buying into the Mayo pain program meant giving up my braces and straps and, with the greatest reluctance, my sitting cushion.  Without it, I shifted constantly in my chair, “bucking like a rodeo horse,” observed a clinic hand. 

For the guy sitting next to me, a former college football player who talked like Hemingway and grew up treeing mountain lions with his forest ranger dad, it meant giving up the opioids he’d become dependent on after his spine had been messed up by an unlicensed quack.  Seeing his transformation gave me hope of finding a path forward.  Although I had known that a third of Americans were afflicted with chronic pain, more than cancer, diabetes and heart disease combined, it was only at this point that I started to shake my sense of isolation. 

Stripped of my props, I tried one of the clinic’s suggestions, to turn my mind toward my breath.  As someone who had grown up on creamed corn and chicken fried steak, this conscious breathing — what hippies call meditation — was a brand of new age hooey that I couldn’t easily stomach.  But even after I left the monthlong program, I worked on making it a daily ritual. 

And gradually, I could feel my relationship with the pain change.  As I sat and concentrated on my breath, flickers of awareness began to emerge like a picture through the snow of an old TV set.  After a month or two (and I never missed a day), I was able to step back and note, like a disinterested observer, how it felt like a tiny creature was gnawing its way out of my hip socket, or how my organs seemed to be stirred by a ladle through my back.  Then, after several months, I noticed that these sensations rose and fell; the constancy of the aggression had been a fantasy. 

Emboldened, I took my wife to a matinee one lazy afternoon — my first time in a movie theater in years.  Surprised that I had sat for such a long stretch, she broke one of Mayo’s commandments and blurted out:

“Does it still hurt?” 

A few seconds passed before it slowly came back into view: a deep ache inside my right hip, a burn dancing between my ankle and outer foot, a slow chewing in my lower back.  The old panic rose.  But this time I didn’t try to attack or run, and it didn’t bark or bite back; we simply eyed each other warily.