Sculptural Expression of Chronic Ankle Pain from Levaquin 2

Levaquin Foot Pain on the Brain 1999

While in chronic pain with tendon ruptures biochemically caused by Levaquin, ( I never needed such a strong antibiotic in the first place)  I could not express the difficulty of living in unabated pain in words so I cut about 100 ankles out of plywood and shaped them into a self-portrait.  This is the face of pain.  Chronic pain takes over your life and your thoughts, sadly.  You feel the pain, you say "crap, here is the pain again, what can I do, how can I live like this" and it's repeated every minute, every 5 seconds unless a strong distraction is made on the other side of the brain. I discovered a little relief by using the 'creative (right"?) side of the brain and in the act of cutting out the feet, the pain relief occurred some for a short time. For those in chronic pain, doing something creative that requires physical interaction is helpful.  In the case of cutting out the feet, it also helped express the anger of what happened to me; I was sort of cutting out the feet of the people at J&J and the FDA who let this awful drug be used for common infections.