How Much Does It Hurt?

On a scale of capsaicin to being boiled in hot oil

As I lay in bed adjusting and readjusting a makeshift ice pack and waiting for the sleeping pill to work its magic, I thought about the nature of pain, and how it appears in a thousand different forms and how every human experiences it and yet, when it’s not our own, it’s so very difficult to imagine its severity. Especially when we can’t see any physical sign of it, it’s so much easier to look at someone who’s suffering and think, “It can’t be as bad as they say. Surely they’re exaggerating.”

Last night I did a stupid thing, and it had some seriously painful consequences.

I was in the kitchen, prepping a family-sized portion of ground beef for tacos (Dad’s Cheesy Tacos from The Half-Baked Harvest, to be exact, and if you haven’t had these, I implore you to please, please do yourself a favor and make a sheet of these bad boys.)

It calls for a poblano pepper to be sautéed in with the meat, and, since I was making a double-batch, I pulled two peppers from the fridge and sliced them open. I smiled to myself, happy that Ethan had so surreptitiously brought them home the day before. I hollowed out the insides with my bare hands, diced the peppers and tossed them into the pan, and went about cooking and cleaning.

A couple of minutes later, I noticed that the skin on my ring finger was beginning to burn. I slid the rings off, noticing that the area beneath was red and inflamed. I shrugged, hollered in the back yard for the kids to get along and please for the love, just SHARE for once, and kept unloading the dishwasher.

By the time that Ethan got home though, the burning feeling had spread up my ring finger and was migrating toward the middle finger. “Are you okay?” he asked as I held out my hand and examined it closely.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “It’s just that my fingers are burning and it seems to be spreading. I think it started after I cut those peppers.”

“Which peppers?” he asked.

“The poblanos you brought home.”

“I didn’t bring home any poblanos. Were they the small ones in the fridge? ‘Cuz…those were jalapeños.”

I had never experienced the full wrath of capsaicin until then;