Bite Point

The Pain Crucible

At 7:59 AM on April 15 I was absolutely fine, checking on a quick question for Annette before seeing my first patient of the day.

At 8:00 AM on April 15 I was writhing on the floor in severe abdominal pain.  The intensity was what we tend to think of as 10 on a scale of 1 to 10; yet Pain- I henceforth use the word as a proper noun- was just getting started with me.  Like a pitcher warming up in the bullpen, his real work was yet to come.  We found out what happened much, much later.

 

It turns out that I had two issues:

 

-A “horseshoe kidney” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_kidney) which can predispose towards various kinds of trouble.

 

-A single kidney stone.

 

I had no prior knowledge of either condition.  What happened was, at 8:00 AM the kidney stone lodged in my kidney’s exit duct and blocked the flow of urine.  But of course my loyal kidneys were still busily cleansing my body of toxins and metabolic byproducts; they are such devoted little chaps.  So then, with nowhere for the liquid to go, the pressure built up and, well, the calyx, the kidney’s outer shell, ruptured.

 

Yup.  My left kidney essentially blew up, right inside of me.

 

The EMT guys, suspecting kidney stone issues, placed an IV line so that in the ER I could get pain meds as fast as possible.  For reasons that I do not understand at all, it was about four hours until I received IV pain medication.  To be fair, this is counting from the onset of the problem; still, only about half an hour was used up in the 911 call and transport- Philly Emergency Services rock.  Busy ER's, apparently, do not.

 

Our team was so great too.  Annette, Reese, Helen and Maryanne were there at the time and took such good care of me.  Add in Barry and Pat and you have a crew like no other, which has held things together beautifully in my absence...

 

Pain, astonishing as he was initially, continued to increase his torture.  It reminded me of that scene in 1984 where O’Brien has Winston in that pain machine and just keeps increasing the intensity to higher and more incomprehensible levels.  That’s just it- I stopped being able to comprehend what was happening.  Pain robbed me of all my reason.  I was reduced to being an animal, crying out loudly and uselessly.  Mostly in fact the whole universe so far as I could tell consisted only of me and Pain locked in battle.  Everything else had ceased to exist.  You’d think in these situations that you’d want to win, to heroically triumph over your malicious, malevolent enemy.  I found the opposite to be true- I wanted Pain to win.   I would have been quite happy, I’m sorry to admit, if Pain had gone and killed me.  Anything to end his hold over me…

 

Finally, finally they gave me morphine- with almost no effect!  Back into grasping despair, except that then they gave me Dilaudid, a morphine derivative, and it brought sweet, delicious relief.

 

My wife Michelle was bravely by my side during most of this time.  It must have been so hard on her to see me suffer so…  I was aware of her presence; at times we held hands and I reached over to her mentally when I had a little extra awareness but most of my resources were just quite simply occupied with Pain.  Ah, there is no better spouse than Michelle; in the recovery period she has struck an excellent balance between concern and setting strict limits so that I don’t cause any setbacks by doing too much.

 

Similarly, people often reach out to God at times of such intense struggle and stress.  I had the great fortune to speak to the eminent theologian Dr. Ron Sider about my experience, just a week afterwards.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Sider)  Dr. Sider asked me if I had prayed during this time.  I answered that I did, but my prayers were pretty much formless; perhaps like the word “Pleeeease” stretched out in time.  Dr. Sider replied in his kindly way that at that moment, God was probably more concerned with my intent than with my eloquence.  Wise words!

 

The doctors and nurses were excellent, the treatment non-invasive.  Kidneys, in addition to being quite loyal to their owners (and they put up with a lot from us, I'll wager), are very resourceful fellows and heal very nicely, even when injured to this degree.

 

This experience has left me changed.  I’m not sure how yet, and I make no value judgment at this point either.  But I do feel different, somehow, after this encounter with Pain; whatever else it may have been, it was a transformative experience.

 

One that I would oh so happily have avoided if I could…

 

The Allure of Sugar- Guest Post by Writer Tom Bentley

For a very long time in our past, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers: they would seek food, but they didn't grow or raise food.  With the advent of farming our forebears gained some measure of control over The Third Necessity, but famine was always lurking just around the corner, ready to pounce at the slightest dusturbance in the elements.  Every human in ancient times spent their lives living under the constant spectre of possible starvation.  This is not just ancient history- the forces of hunger have shaped us in deep and profound ways.  Modern America is, in spite of recent events, a land of abundance.  Today, when presented with foods containing concentrated sugars or fats- powerful energy sources that sustained our ancestors in the lean times- we often still react by giving in to temptation and eating more than we should of foods that we, well, shouldn't.

I asked my friend, writer extraordinaire Tom Bentley, to do a guest post here in which he delves into the mind of a sugar-chasing adolescent, namely himself.  Come along for the ride as Tom, in his inimitable way, gives a look into the window of: Ourselves.

 

You've probably seen a variant of this in some horror film: some trusted character's face, benign and loving, is suddenly revealed from a shocking new angle. Maybe horns sprout, there's a death's head skeleton seen shimmering within, a slight smile joins with brimstone eyes into a twisted evil thing. But then the character returns to the irresistible charmer you always knew her to be.

 

That (with the appropriate Tesla arcing of electricity) would be my happy child's face, paired with the alternating skin-stripped-away face that reveals, over time, my tormented teeth. Tormented? Aye, cap'n: these are the teeth of a man who was such a dedicated consumer of sugared objects—the more sugary the better—in his youth that it's miraculous that I still have any grinders left to grimace with.

 

I went from kid-hood to punk-hood from the late 50s to the late 60s, and that was a time when the processed foods industry was truly in its ascendance. Convenience foods, like packaged cereals, were, well, convenient. Corn syrup had yet to stab its nutrition-sucking needle in every product under the sun, but there were still many demons in the product aisles.  Candy bars were a nickel—five cents for a blast of sugared dynamite! I blasted, and enjoying the sensation, blasted again and again.  My brother and I would eat an entire box (and children, the boxes were bigger then) of Frosted Flakes at one sitting. Mmmm! I frequently ate an entire half-gallon of ice cream; a dozen doughnuts: no problem. My mother, the beleaguered shopper in this tawdry enterprise, began to despair of both my teeth and her wallet, and she began restricting our intake.

 

But by that point, around age 9 or 10, I was addicted; sugar was my soulmate. The neighborhood store personnel called me the Candy Man, because I would come in and buy 5, 7, 10 candy bars or other treats at a time, along with a giant RC Cola or two. Where was I getting the money? Well, if you're near my age, you might remember those square, folding coin-collecting books that had slots for the coins. My parents had given those to my siblings and me, and they'd let us go through their coins when they came home from work. We worked on those collections for years, books  of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and even half-dollars. We had nothing actually rare, but there were some nice old coins in those collections. 

 

"Were" is the word: my father had stored the more-full books in our attic, and I began taking them down and filching the coins to feed my sugar flame. Before it was discovered that Little Tommy was on the take, those books were about 1/4 their weight. Candy! Candy called to me, the sweet siren song, coin collections be damned.

 

I engaged one of my friends to be a sugar child with me, early co-dependency. We'd go to my Candy Man store, load up, and then go back to my room, close the door, and eat everything we'd brought back in our laden bags. I called them "Celebrations." Benders, essentially. Of course, I was so sugared-up that I hardly wanted to eat anything at dinner. Vegetables? Get thee behind me, Satan!  

 

There were consequences. My boyhood dentist drove a lovely Jaguar XKE; I had to have at least paid for its transmission. I once was diagnosed with seven cavities at one appointment. Many, many crowns adorn my non-regal enamels. Three root canals. One bridge. Some periodontal work. A hole where an implant should be. (Damn things are pricey.)

Of course I'm careful NOW. I floss, I pick, I brush religiously. But my candy-crazed mind didn't pay that much attention to my mother and father telling me to do those very things back then. I still love sugar, though; I just don't eat it in nearly the quantities that I did. I'm more choosy, going for the good chocolate, the high-end confections. I don't eat dessert after breakfast, lunch and dinner anymore. But sometimes, when I eat a small bowl of good ice cream, I can still feel the fever of my old self heating up—I KNOW I could eat a half-gallon again, delirious, inward-eyed, my soul glazed and syrupy.

 

I don't want to be one of those hovering protectors, preventing kids from having a nice dessert, an ice cream on a summer's day, but for some kids like me, man, that stuff should have come with a warning label.

 

-Tom Bentley

http://www.tombentley.com/wordpress/