Body

One damp winter night when I was eight years old, our family doctor pulled up to our house, accompanied by his black leather bag. My mother had called him in a panic because I had suddenly become nearly unable to breathe. The doctor, after examining me and questioning my mother, determined that what I was experiencing was severe asthma, triggered by an aspirin tablet I’d taken earlier that evening. I was, it turned out, allergic to aspirin.

My allergy to aspirin became a permanent part of my medical profile. Many times as an adult, long after I’d outgrown my various other childhood allergies, I would occasionally ask my current doctor whether it might make sense to try taking aspirin and see whether I still had an adverse reaction. “Why take a chance?” the doctor would always say.

Not being able to take aspirin is hardly a liability these days. Aspirin has largely fallen out of favor, with ibuprofen and acetaminophen becoming the everyday painkillers of choice. But in the early 1960s, aspirin was still the thing that everyone used to relieve discomfort. (The cliché doctor’s advice “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning” dates from that era.) If aspirin was out of the picture, what was I supposed to take instead when I was sick?

It turned out that a little-known drug called Tylenol had recently become available over the counter. It wasn’t yet being widely marketed, but doctors knew about it. Tylenol was meant to be a substitute for aspirin, but generally only for people like me for whom taking aspirin was a problem. My family’s medicine cabinet remained stocked with aspirin, but soon it was accompanied by a small bottle of Tylenol for my exclusive use. Whenever I had a headache, that’s what I would turn to.

The problem was that I had a lot of headaches, and that made my mother angry. My job was to be a happy, well-adjusted kid, and happy kids aren’t supposed to get headaches. If I was so stressed out as to have tension headaches all the time, she insisted, I must be doing something wrong. But the fact is that in struggling to live up to expectations at home and at school, I was stressed. If I could have taken aspirin when my head hurt, nobody would have noticed that the number of tablets was slightly reduced. But because I was taking Tylenol, it was clear who was to blame when the supply ran out.

“More headaches?!” my mother would snap when I asked her to buy a new bottle of Tylenol. She would insist on only buying a small bottle, perhaps under the assumption that limiting the supply would limit the frequency of my headaches. But that only meant that I had to ask her more frequently to buy another bottle, which did nothing to limit my stress level.

Recent studies have suggested that acetaminophen — i.e., Tylenol — is a more effective analgesic than aspirin, and that ibuprofen (which wasn’t generally available until the 1980s) is more effective still. But in the 1960s and early ’70s, aspirin was still king, and it was my firm conviction that Tylenol wasn’t nearly as effective at relieving my headaches as the “good stuff” had been. I therefore had the consolation of being able to luxuriate in my victimhood.

I don’t mean to imply that I was suffering badly. These were mere tension headaches — not migraines, which I understand to be a hundred times worse. As I got older and gained more control over my life, my head ached much less often, and since I was self-employed and had a flexible schedule, I could usually go take a nap with the assurance that, with or without Tylenol, the headache would probably be gone when I woke up.

It was only when I began my teaching career in my 40s that I had to start thinking again about headaches. I remember the first time a headache cropped up when I was scheduled to teach a class, and I suddenly realized that no matter what my state of discomfort, I still had to teach the damn class. Something about that struck me as profoundly unfair. Why should my job require me to do something that my body was clearly objecting to?

That’s when I realized how extraordinarily privileged I was. For most of human history, people’s work and their bodies were inextricably linked. For me to be able to draw a conceptual line, with my work on one side and my body on the other, was an unprecedented state of affairs. And even now, most people’s occupations require them to interact with the hard, dirty physical world rather than with abstract information. Miners still have to mine, and maintenance workers still have to maintain, even if they’re experiencing physical discomfort; and more to the point, the work itself takes a toll on their physical well-being.

A friend of mine is a contractor who has done all of the remodeling, repair, and maintenance on our home for the past 25 years. He’s my age, but his body has nearly given out; he can’t accomplish much without the help of a younger assistant. He’s struggling to figure out what his place is in the world. I, meanwhile, continue to sit at my computer, doing the same work (if “work” is the appropriate term) that I’ve done all my life. I’ve done nothing to deserve that advantaged outcome. If I still get an occasional headache, what right have I to complain?