Shoot The Messenger!

Tommy's pain meds from his hip surgery.

    So pain, as I understand it, is actually a messenger sent by the brain with an important communique'  warning that something is wrong with some part of the body .
    But rather than  delivering the message with skilled discretion, pain tends to announce its presence too loudly then rams the message home, sometimes even sloppily spilling the goods (or the bads - pain's message is seldom a good one)  to neighboring nerve cells for whom the bad news was not  intended.
    No diplomatic courier, pain.
    Nor, after running its errand for the brain, does this messenger make a quick tactful departure back to from whence it came, but rather keeps hanging around, banging out  its something-is-wrong message over and over until you want to yell, "Okay, okay, I got it, just leave already!"  You'll offer it  an aspirin or a Tylenol or even a glass of wine or a shot of whiskey to just go away.  And sometimes it will.
    But sometimes it won't, in which case you've got to deal not only with the problem the pain is warning you about but the pain itself, because the pain has become as bad a problem as the problem it's warning you about.  Sometimes worse.
    Which begs the question, as asked by the character Yossarian in "Catch 22":
    "Why couldn't (God) have used a doorbell instead to notify us?"
    In truth, I've wondered about that myself.  Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts I came up with on the subject.
    But in the meantime here on the home  front Tommy has been trying to deal with the bad messenger with the help of four different pain killers (none of which are doing any actual killing; just some tolerable neutralizing), a lot of ice and exercising and, maybe the best medicine of all:

      An evening of board games with great friends.