With the support of her husband, two children, family and friends, Greenberg was able to find her path. Greenberg, who is 43 and a professor of poetry and classic literature at Hunter College in New York, chronicles her ordeal in “A Body Broken” with sincerity, honesty – and a meaningful selection of poems, ranging from Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath to John Milton. A critical injury that she had battled and overcome at age 19 had returned with a vengeance at age 41 – and, as she would eventually find, there is no cure for her. Twenty-two years after her neck was broken in a horrific car accident, Greenberg’s doctors discovered that the fracture had never really healed. Chronic pain has been a part of her life for two years now – an old injury reborn in an intense and unrelenting headache that attacked out of the blue as she was doing research in a London archive.

Louis native who is in town for a Friday book signing, Thursday afternoon was a 4 on that 5-point scale. It is heavier than an ice-cream headache, though it feels as if an enormous weight lies along the tendon, crushing this central route, tearing my head in half …įor Greenberg, a St. It feels like an ice-cream headache – the sharp deep freeze of eating or drinking too much of a cold substance too quickly. Its sinews unfurling, the pain whips through the middle of my head. These spikes are unrelenting, stare-at-the-ceiling, wait-it-out pain. On a scale of 1 to 5, my pain never falls below a 3 and will rise at some point to a 5 nearly daily and stay there for hours.

I am in pain from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. Louis Beacon, Ma- To appreciate any day in the life of author Lynne Greenberg, begin with this passage from “The Body Broken,’’ her striking new memoir of pain:

The body broken by lynne greenberg