If you are familiar with the Matrix movie franchise, you know that it portrays humans living in a manufactured reality controlled by sentient machines. I got to see the 4th installment of the series over the holidays and it struck me as the perfect metaphor for what I had gone through between getting injured and the elective amputation of the middle of my hand.

If you haven’t seen the fourth movie, I’ll try not to spoil it for you, but it starts with Keanu Reeve’s character living a seemingly normal life as a programmer but feeling restless, like there is something more that he can’t put his finger on. Friends, co-workers, and a therapist keep telling him that his lived experience, the previous movies, were just a mental breakdown. While he listens to them and does as he is asked, he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong and his anxiety grows. In one scene, he is pictured in a bubble bath with a rubber ducky on his head, looking catatonic. The visual juxtaposition of what should be a fun and relaxing experience – a bubble bath and a rubber ducky, and a person hollowed out on the inside from questioning their own reality resonated with me. That was exactly what it felt like when I was living with chronic pain in my hand. Friends, family, and co-workers all tried to keep my spirits up, but no one could relate to what I was going through. And the medical professionals I sought out for help kept giving me the same message: I should just “deal with it,” and the pain I was experiencing was either in my head or I was making it worse through psychological means. I’m not a bubble bath person, but I had many, many moments like that one where I just sat catatonic, wondering if the pain that was sometimes so severe that my vision would go white, was just something I was making up. Was I crazy?

The thing about the Matrix movies is that there is a reason that the machines have created this alternate reality for humans, and keeping them there had a purpose. None of the medical professionals ever offered a reason that I could be making such extreme claims about pain. Not that it should have mattered, but I never asked for any sort of pain medications, and none were ever offered, except after surgeries. Was I just a wimp who couldn’t handle a little discomfort? Was I seeking attention? Was it because I wasn’t male?¹ My pain did have a purpose, it was telling me that something was very, very wrong with my hand. But if doctors couldn’t diagnose it, was anything actually wrong?²

Somewhere between my first hand surgery and amputation, I got a tattoo of shark jaws on my middle and ring fingers so I would have something to help break me out of the negative thought patterns. When I found myself spiraling, I would use my hand like a shadow puppet and make it sing along to music, or feed it Goldfish crackers, anything silly to break me out of my negative thought pattern. It didn’t help with any of the pain I was having, but it stopped me from visualizing the ways I could cut my finger off myself to escape the pain. Half of the tattoo was obviously removed with the amputation. But the other half stands as a reminder of the mental scars I still bear from a medical industry that tried to convince me that I was living in an alternate reality.

1 Billock Jennifer. BBC. Pain bias: The Health Inequality Rarely Discussed https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180518-the-inequality-in-how-women-are-treated-for-pain

2 Baruch, Jay M. AMA Journal of Ethics. Why Must Pain Patients Be Found Deserving of Treatment: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/why-must-pain-patients-be-found-deserving-treatment/2008-01