A Nebulous Problem
The banality of pain
About three weeks ago, I started getting awful headaches. I’m not normally keen on medical intervention for transient conditions, but they got bad enough I:
Went to urgent care
Went to the doctor, where they were alarmed at how many headaches I’d been having
Went to a neurologist
Also, I worried a lot. I thought perhaps the headaches came from stress, in which case I was pretty worried; my wife is pregnant, and I’ve heard that new parenthood is extremely stressful. If my body couldn’t take my current level of stress, I felt like I’d be in real trouble and fail as a new parent. I wondered if I had some serious new condition, or an unknown food intolerance.
Then we took a weekend trip to the beach, on which my head mostly behaved, and I got home, and sat in the recliner we bought a few weeks ago. Within an hour my head and ears hurt, my sinuses were on fire, and my eyes were itchy.
Suddenly, things started falling into place. The headaches were at their worst the weekend we had the recliner delivered, which was also a holiday weekend, so I’d been in the living room relaxing more than usual. We took our air quality monitor and put it by the recliner, and sure enough, the VOC levels were 10 times higher than elsewhere in the house (and rapidly went down once we moved the recliner). And it passes the sniff test - new furniture really is coated in chemicals, and sometimes emits them for a while.
So how does it feel, to have been poisoned for a few weeks by a comfy chair? Well, first of all, pretty bad. Second, it’s a relief to understand what’s actually going on. But third, it’s a strange feeling to wander through various hypotheses, groping for some kind of explanation for new and distracting pain, and to finally arrive at something with little to no meaning at all. It wasn’t emotional baggage. It wasn’t covid or the flu. It wasn’t stress. It was a small quantity of toxic gas, coming from my relaxation spot.
Do I take any lessons from this, that might be useful to an enterprising reader? Sure!
Get an air quality monitor, and move it around sometimes when you feel off
Rule out simple environmental explanations before complex ones (e.g. make the air is okay before making a food journal)
Think more carefully about when a problem starts (I thought some about when the headaches kicked in, but the recliner purchase hadn’t occurred to me)
If pain’s root cause is unknown, remember it’s unknown (and don’t package it in a grand narrative of psychological significance)
NEW FURNITURE SPEWS TOXIC GAS FOR A WHILE???? AAAAAAAAAAA
So, yeah. Been a little slower at blogging recently, and also everything else. This blog post brought to you from my bedroom, where volatile organic compounds are low. Stay fresh, friends.
So true! Meaning attribution is a complex phenomenon. When deciphering discomfort, I think most of us go for the highest profile stressor first. It probably makes the most sense to start our interrogation with the lesser torments like sleep, diet, and allergy, and work slowly toward the bigger issues like family, vocation, or serious disease.