pain room

PRESSURE (See also cut by the Kinks)

Published: JULY 28, 2025 | Edit
PANTYLINERS (for Clothes/or pain room chapbook)

I needed to use a harsh ungenrt for a pressure sore on my butt. “On your sit-bones.
But it was not to come poff and into my underpants. That’s now an acceptable word. Underpants. I have bought various products to deal with the sour issue fore my skin.

It occurred to me rather than try to keep small gauze pads on my sores, just wear panty-liners. How .do you like them apples. Often, gauze pads they were too small and needed to be. Supplemented with the gauze pads anyway. Right now it is 3:30, a.m.I forgot to take my melatonin. Spo I, only took 5 mgs now and I will sleep in a little wjhile. The pain is worse again, but I must wait until ,6 am. What to do with pain in my shoulder and my shoulder-blades slicing into my back. I could tell you about my pain on a scale of one to ten, from 1 to 10.

My care aid came to m y appointment with a “private” OT Occupational Therapist and I showed the OT her my bruises and sores. The sores on my butt were the worst. She got some Coloplast to, put on pressure sores right next to my butthole. I turned on my side with my pants down. No shame. Just please help me with my sore. She showed the aide my sores and how to treat them. No shame, what does a 70-year-old grumbling old man care about his dignity. A man whose boy butt was worth molesting when I was ten. Molested once you are molested for life.
Now all I have is a nurse putting unguent on my urgent sit-bones and be happy about it.

I came up with the idea I use panty-liners, would stick more likely to my underpants and not fall off into the toilet all the time. I stopped trying to fish them out of the toilet, they were all wet and dirty. I was worried they would clog the toilet. (See shit-balls). But panty liners covered so much more area, but it was hard to do them myself, until I learned and managed to do it properly this morning.

“Dear wife,” “will you please look at my pressure sores on my butt hole? She has her own problems. MS flaring up electrifying her skin on one complete side of her body. I could not touch her, but she could help me place the panty liners and gauze bandages. Hey what do you know!?” The unguent worked and relieved my pain on my skin around my butthole. Sitting on. Pain and it be a skin pain was a new one for me, but much easier to use panty -liners, The aide went out to by them at the drug stores. MY pain is too big my right arm is screaming. “Help me! Help me please! But. No-one can hear me. No-one can help me. I have unguent on my sit-bones..
I need to stop and I have to apply more medicine to take down my pressure sores.
“It hurts when I sit on them:””
“Don’t sit on them then! Find ways to sleep on your sides. ”My sides are broken my bones sound like a bag of chicken bones”
“Kill them, cook them. Use them scum to, put on your pressure sores.
This is the only klinic, it’s a private KLINIC you know? Just put this stuff on your butt. Use pressure bandages for your sores.

After a day or two of sheer frustration I thought to my-self. Panty-liners! Aha! That’s the answers, I’ll use the special cream ands put on panty liners (back to front, I have a big butt) to keep my underpants clean. What a good idea?” said my wife and our care aide, who went to buy panty-liners at a nearby pharmacy. I’m sitting on one that is coming off, time to get more . Away goes the care aide and comes back with panty liners
Which I stick to new briefs ordered from Amazon; and cover my sores with Coloplast ,. And then. The panty liners need to be placed just right, back to front because I need the widest coverage behind my butt, you know where I wear these panty-liners hat ha, but also some. Gauze stuffed back there in my underpants. I’ve got nearly whoa!! I have exactly 700 words, 200 more than I was going for.
This hurts, that hurts, peeved, that’s what I am PEEVED!!! . These panty liners help keep my ointment, unguent, what-ever in place.
Pain pain go away come again…wait a Minutes, I do NOT WANT PAIN to come
back again. Fuck no. Now where is the Coloplast!?

« A

Public + Free by Subscribe to Posts

THIS WEEK AND THE LAST
July 17, 2025
ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT

1. Day
Started the day with satisfying turn on our 19” high toilet
the tallest the plumber had ever seen checking in later
to see how we were making out and we’re both tall
our feet touch the floor. We’ve added a step stool
for that added squash. How to explain to hard-hearted
health professionals that many poops a day can be as normal
as the one poop a day recommended by my proctologist
who goes by a different name but today is not one of those
days when one delivery is all that’s needed. Many gifts
tall, short, fat, and slim none were shunned, even
those that turned out to be little more than a fart
but I don’t take those chances anymore my colon says
sit thee down sir, to let it rip, so much noise and the tiniest
matching turds I can hear the “so cute” chirping of the aide
de camp this morning. I speak no more of this mortification
All day and not a spot of diarrhea, say thanks to carrot cake,
porridge, fruit by hand and by knife and spoon sugar and cream
May my dreams be gentle and my guts empty enough
to stay off the pot until morning.

2. Night (Weeks later)
Innocuous shredded wheat and bran 9pm milk
raises a ruckus from here to the where house
work is needed breath is needed scramble up
got oxygen I sit hang my head make up
bigger coughing fits, there is some elusive
shred of wheat alright, but it should not be
boxed to kill me, oh you hair trigger bull shit
my breath has real volume rattling I heard
saved for dying and that is not me I wheel
over to my wife who rises to listen to me
breathing she is quick to pound my back
as directed, and then listen closely front and back
the lungs, I have two of them but
they were severely tested a year ago.

I was poisoned one year ago. I aspirated my Sunday dinner
like the one we are having tonight yes, my snacks too
angering the nurse at one end of my body “if he pulls
through tell him he needs to chew his food” this I remembered
coughing apoplectically trying to catch my elusive breath
too much undone; you’re not welcome at table Dr. Death.

Coda:
LUNGS

I wish I could keep you wrapped in soft Jehovah leather
sacrificial sheep skin and wool shutter its stuttering

2023 Journal Fragments still on Large Avenue

The day begins with an unwelcome discovery. I am running out of Suboxone the brand name of the opioids that I take by prescription which includes its antidote. Is there a point in writing how it scares me to have discovered my doctor has it wrong. Fear is at large, here on Large Avenue. I am getting toast and I’ll ask her to bring my “fake” leg. The rubber liner was cut wrong (I think) by my prosthetics guy who is making me a new prosthetic leg for 2024.

But that does not figure hardly at all in my pain management, it’s Suboxone I need, I need to know the dosage from last month is the same for this month. He can easily make me a new liner for my new fake leg. Now I’m worried about how long it is taking for toast. Jayden is making it, but is she bringing it, or is it waiting. It was waiting as it turns out., Strategy to get me into the flow, while I load my music by the albums how much Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins can I stand.

ANGEL OF MERCY

April 1, 2025
MEDICINE

I reach into
My angel’s apron

Their blister pac of medicine
close enough now

To the hour.
So small and so dense

It’s just enough. We call it
Self-defense.

ALWAYS ALWAYS BREATHE

Murray Toews – Bio 2022

Murray Toews is a “Deluxe artist” whose work spans the disciplines and media of writing, drawing, print, film, audio-art, interactivity and digital / analog hand-drawn animation that make use of thematic process-driven animation techniques that rapidly create animated shorts. He received a BFA first class honours degree with a thesis in advanced drawing from the U of M in 1992.

In 2004, he curated “Animator/Re-Animator” featuring Prairie animation with screenings in Canada and Japan. In 2012, his animated short Thought Camera, Reel One: “Circus of Objects” was the official selection for the NSI Online Short Film Festival and the 2013 Gimli Film Festival Manitoba program.

In 2018 he premiered “10 Years Before Happiness”- a subjective and allegorical autobiography seen through the youthful lens of intense emotion and surreality as he explores a personal landscape of shifting memory.

In 2022, he continues to produce and collaborate with a small group of talented cinematographers, writers, and audio artists to create short, animated and live action films as an independent artist and as the owner of an indie-driven media business called URBANSTICKMAN Productions.

PAIN IN MY NECK

July 2, 2022

I SCARE MYSELF[1]

Even with M keeping me in bed it’s dark after ten even on Canada Day. Deefer Dog is shaking between us until he’s not and the bangs stop banging. I start my journey into the night my body and my mind insisting on separate rips. I wake as my arm sweeps the tall lotions off the night table on my first pass, and see my arm dislocated, barely attached to my shoulder and twice as long. Second pass I get the water and nearly everything else, struggling into consciousnes with a deep affirmatiion from M to put up my side bed rail to corral my chaos just enough to let her sleep and stop scaring the dog.  

I scare myself when I scream ten out of ten and a pain generates upside my neck bending over to take off my fake leg. The aftershocks in pieces of my mind send me to the hospital emergency, but only when I throw in the cxrying towel a week later. Taken, and taken seriously for a brain CT scan and an appointment with a doctor at the TIA ( mini-stroke)clinic. The vascular neurologist shows me my brain, unremarkable except for as small mass on my third ventricle. My body memory choses the day my son had his mass in his fourtth ventricle removed in an eight hour brain surgery to press rewind replay remember I scare myself.

The neurologist does point out one of my arteries to the brain is narrowing. Meditarraen diet he says, eat more vegetables! I nod in pain. I breathe, again. Then he moves down to the scan of my cervical spine. “Oh, my,” he says as I want him to speak, “your neck is horrible, horrible!” Those words, the word horrible exact as much as anything in this world that scares me everyday I open  my eyes. My cervical spine curves the wrong way and the small tab-like disks have crumbled like feta. Still me, parts of my body scare me.

The pain I feel belongs to me, something I’ve held as my own since I was a child. Friends, relatives even doctors, exclaim, “no idea how you do what you do so much with all your injuries and ailments, you are absolutely fabulous! I wish I could have such an interesting life. Considering all your challenges you are  absolutely THRIVING.” THis is why I need a new psych, to build some prespective; reality checks sure, but ignoring the tempatation to fervently believe my achievements outweigh my pain.”

How hard it was and is, to explain to my families and friends that Icanbe in severe mental distress despite success dogging my steps. I am not worthy, I am unclean, I do not deserve to be let off the hook. So I dangle like a particple waiting for a psychistrist to take me down to listen when I scare myself.

Grace Paley writes: 

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come. 

They said, Really? 

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible. 

[…] 

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning. 

That’s a metaphor, right? 

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart. 

Talk? What? 

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember. 

The day he thought the weight of the world was on his shoulders, he realized it was his suspenders holding up his pants.

Let’s get one thing straight, this isn’t about the pleasure of pain sex. This is about the pain of pain. How much it hurts. This is where I let it all hang out, in dispatches from inside the pain room. We all have our own pain and suffering, and it seems woefully inadequate to be sending dispatches from my torn, aching body and brain, while thousands are dying in wars and famines around this world; noisily, I persist.

May 19, 2018

“Pain is always new to those who suffer, but loses its originality for those around them.”[1]

[1] Alphonse Daudet, La doulou: (la douleur), 1887-1895 (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930) p. 16; Julian Barnes (ed. and trans.) In the Land of Pain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) p. 19

BEDTIME ACCOMMODATIONS

Shrink sock on my stump
glasses on the night table
gauntlets on my wrists and forearms
mouth open meds riding
the water slide of my throat
mouth-guard so I don’t grind all night.

Richard Hines Photo

There I said said, a diaper around my bottom
like the cartoon of a New Year’s baby (just kidding)
my body a perfect vertical lie on the horizontal
line, music quiet and classical
temperature just past the click
parking lot lights on the ceiling
filtered by my apartment’s vertical blinds.

There is no you just me taking up
as much space as I can muster
your used to be pillow carries
your scent in the memory foam
while the clock counts down
the minutes needed to pass
over time before I can die.

written June 2020 revised Jan.5 2021

1 2 10

On a scale of 1 to (2) 10 where 1 is the least pain you’ve ever experienced and 10 is the most pain you’ve ever experienced, how much does it hurt? This line is asked repeatedly in the heath sector, especially in dealing with extreme pain, accidents, life threatening diseases, or trauma to determine the location and the extent of the pain.

Sunday November 5, 10:08

“the condition” by Charles Bukowski from WAR ALL THE TIME Poems 1981- 1984, read by Victor Enns

“suggestion for an arrangement” by Charles Bukowski,  from his collection WAR ALL THE TIME – Poems 1981-1984 read by Victor Enns