Afterword/Citations
Pain Scale #3
Laura Roberts. Cumulus Cloud, Greeenfield MA. 2024. Photograph.
Pain Scale #4
Illustration altered by Laura Roberts from William Wallace Denslow’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” illustration in Denslow’s Mother Goose by Anonymous. Project Gutenberg eBook, 1902. Public domain in the United States. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18546. Accessed April 29, 2026.
Pain Scale #5
Photograph altered by Laura Roberts from “Doctor Assists Patient Undergoing MRI Scan in Healthcare Facility” by MART PRODUCTION, Pexels. Free to use under the Pexels license. Accessed April 30, 2026.
Pain Scale #6
Laura Roberts. Mount Toby State Park, Montague MA. 2023. Photograph.
Pain Scale #9
MRI images altered by Laura Roberts. Original images from the author’s personal cervical spine MRI records, Cooley Dickinson Hospital.
Pain Scale #10
Nursery rhyme told to my mother in the 1940s by her grandmother who was nicknamed “Hoho.” The nursery rhyme appears to have originated sometime after the 1890s since shredded wheat was invented in 1893.
My mother said, “She would say things like this when I was bad. It scared the bejesus out of me.”
I said, “You mean the rhyme was used as a punishment?”
She said, “Well, whatever I was doing, it stopped me dead in my tracks.”
She also mentioned that her grandmother would say, “I’m going to beat 9 kinds of hell out of you” and that would have the same effect because she’d stop and wonder what 9 kinds of hell could be.
Image altered by Laura Roberts. Original image: Please Mommy—More!, 1927 Shredded Wheat advertisement, art by Anne Ganes. The Shredded Wheat Co., Niagara Falls, NY.
Discarded Quote
“Notwithstanding their differences, all these entities share a long-term location (the human body), an ultimate purpose (dispersing progeny to new bodies), a modus operandi (interacting with our bodily systems, including our nervous one), and psychology-relevant mementoes – their effects on our brain and behavior. Whereas our cohabitation with one or another of them may not pose a strong challenge to the commonly shared assumption that humans are unitary individuals, the presence of a large number and wide variety of such entities – and the power they have on us – renders this assumption untenable. We are not organisms but superorganisms, and understanding our behavior ultimately requires an understanding of the network of selfish entities that inhabit our body and actively interact with it. It is time to change the very concept we have of ourselves and to realize that one human individual is neither just human nor just one individual.”[1]
[1] Kramer, Peter, and Paola Bressan. “Humans as Superorganisms: How Microbes, Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1 July 2015, Vol. 10(4) 464-481