The Yellow World Read Online Free

percent) are not painful. It’s movies that have turned it into something painful. It’s difficult for me to think of a movie in which someone with cancer doesn’t cry from pain, or vomit, or die, or take huge amounts of morphine. They always show the same things: pain and death.
    When I wrote
4th Floor
* it was, above all, because I wanted to write a positive movie, a realistic one, one that would deal with the issue properly and show what the lives of people with cancer are really like. How they live through all this “false” pain that the movies show. How they fight and how they die, yes, but how not everything revolves around vomit, pain, and death.
    When I got better I thought that I’d forget this lesson, but actually it was the first one I remembered. There is a lot of pain outside of the hospital and hospital life, pain that isn’t medical, that doesn’t have anything to do with injections or surgical operations. There’s pain that comes from other people, people who inflict pain whether willingly or unwillingly.
    And it was in my cancer-free life that I really felt pain: pain from love, from sadness, from pride, in my work. This was when I remembered that pain doesn’t exist; the word
pain
doesn’t exist. When I started to go back to thinking about what I really felt when these things happened to me, I realized that sometimes it was nostalgia, sometimes it wasdefenselessness, sometimes unease, and sometimes loneliness. But it wasn’t pain.
    When I was a boy, when I learned in the hospital that pain doesn’t exist, I felt, at the age of fourteen, like a superhero whose power was never to feel pain.
    I had a friend who said: “It’s like you’re made out of iron; you never notice when something pricks you.” Now that I’m older I realize that I still get pricked all the time: sometimes three or four pricks all at once in different places, sometimes only once, right in the heart. The secret is not to be unfeeling or made of iron, but to allow yourself to be penetrated, to be touched, and then to rename whatever it is you feel.
    The list is easy. The discovery is easy: The word
pain
doesn’t exist. Step by step …
    1. Think of words whenever you think of
pain
. Look for five or six that define what you’re feeling, but don’t let any of them be
pain
.
    2. When you’ve got them, think of the one that best defines whatever you’re feeling; this is your “pain.” This is the word that defines what you’re feeling.
    3. Get rid of the word
pain
and substitute the new word. Stop feeling “pain” and feel this new definition as strongly as possible. Feel this sentiment.
    It might seem impossible for this to work, but with time you’ll control it and realize that pain doesn’t exist. Physical pain, an aching heart—all of these really conceal other sensations, other feelings. And these can be overcome. When you know what you’re feeling, it’s easier to get over it.
----
    *
4th Floor
(
Planta 4 a
, directed by Antonio Mercero, 2003): a comedy-drama about four teenage long-term patients in the cancer wing of a Spanish hospital.

3
The energy that appears after thirty minutes is what you need to solve a problem
    Whatever you do, don’t open the envelope with the results of the X-ray
.
    —doctor to patient
    Let’s open it right away
.
    —patient to family
when he gets the envelope
    Very often in the hospital we had to get test results. There’s no moment of greater tension than when you’ve got the envelope with the CAT scan or the X-ray results in your hand.
    Over the course of ten years, this situation repeated itself lots of times. They would give you the X-rays and the envelope with the results and tell you again and again that you weren’t to open it, that you should give it to the doctor.
    There was normally about two weeks between getting the results and the doctor’s appointment. Two weeks is a longtime to keep an envelope closed when what’s inside it might tell you that