Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge: Naked World
Fishing for smut
The Canadian government is cracking down on sex-related Internet surfing.
By Jack Boulware
[04/26/00]

Immunized against addiction
Can a simple vaccine kill the appetite for cocaine? Researchers may soon find out.
By Dawn MacKeen
[04/26/00]

Urge: Naked World
Healthy wombs
Zinc and selenium are better for you than beer and potato chips.
By Jack Boulware
[04/25/00]

Urge
Going upstream
It was lovemaking with the landscape.
By Roland Wall
[04/25/00]

Tales from the emergency room
She was 15 years old and pregnant -- and her mother was 275 pounds of fury.
By J.B. Orenstein, M.D.
[04/24/00]

Complete archives for Health & Body

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

When the pain came, would I behave with some amount of stoicism and even grim humor, like the protagonists in Hemingway novels whom I so admired? Or would I moan and howl in sounds far beyond intelligible human speech?

Last year I found out when a kidney stone made its slow passage through my right ureter. You may not know what ureters are -- certainly you wouldn't be too aware that you possessed them until a bit of solid matter larger than the ureter's diameter left your kidney for the journey to the outside world.

This journey can begin suddenly, with paralyzing force. "Like being hit with a two-by-four," one friend told me. "Like being shot with an arrow," said another. But no simile can adequately describe pain, or pleasure for that matter; it must be experienced. We can know the concrete causes of pain, like pressure, too much heat, the splitting of the flesh, but the resultant pain is an abstraction, and like all abstractions it lies beyond the precise grasp of language. We simply don't have the words. We can have trouble, then, describing our own pain and another's pain, even when it manifests itself in grimacing, say, or writhing. Ultimately it remains metaphysical -- something to doubt.

My kidney stone "attack" tugged me from an uneasy sleep at 3:07 a.m. The pain was then only a few degrees beyond uncomfortable, and I thought for some hopeful minutes that I might have a strange muscle cramp or that my innards were protesting against the odd-tasting tofu burger I had risked for dinner. I tried to ignore it. I tried to force my thoughts elsewhere. But the pain was insistent. I massaged my side and twisted this way and that, but no amount of repositioning or rubbing relieved the hot spike tunneling through my abdomen.

The pain ascended through the long hours of the early morning toward a level that dwarfed all the other pains I had known before, including an abscessed tooth and torn ankle ligaments. It nearly equaled the spectacular sensation of bringing a hammer down upon my thumb, but that was brief in comparison, a few minutes of localized agony that then settled into a bearable throbbing. The pain in my side was not just severe but unrelenting, a continuous deep gnawing coupled with cold sweats, nausea and other blades of pain that radiated throughout the confused coils of my digestion, causing more mischief there.

I paced the length of the house, took a hot bath, tried some yoga and breathing exercises taken from a dusty New Age book I had once purchased as a cure for all my ills. I pulled my hair, pressed my temples, bit my fist. Before all emotions left me, I cursed with a flamboyance that, were I loud enough, would surely have caused the houseplants to wilt. At one point, I curled up on the floor like the insensate fetus I wished then to be. But no measure I took lessened the pain.

When the sun fully rose, I was still in pain, and still grinding my teeth against it some hours later in the emergency room of a local hospital. A nurse inserted a shunt into the back of my hand and hooked me up to an I.V. meant to flush the stone from my plumbing. It would be an additional hour of pain before I received a mainline of blessed Toradol. In 20 minutes, the pain began to retreat. In half an hour, I was smiling, joking with the nurse and listening to the prosaic conversations of the staff, even as other emergency cases groaned and yelped in the curtained spaces about me. But I smiled and joked because of relief, not elation. In fact, while I was still in the E.R., a peculiar despair began to creep over me.

Next page | The shame of being a body