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While waiting, I thought back to the attack and how my desire for the pain to end quickly became a need exclusive of all other considerations. Family, job, achievements, passions and the like all lost their significance. The pain became more than a steel box that separated me from anything but itself, more than a wedge that drove itself between my mind and body, making me more fully, if not totally, the latter. What great pain does, I learned that long night, is obliterate memory, in fact, "all psychological content, painful, pleasurable and neutral," as philosopher Elaine Scarry writes in "The Body in Pain." When that occurs, we are no more than flesh, bone and blood. We lose our character, who we are. This is the true nature of the joy we feel at pain's cessation -- the recovery of our humanity.

Eventually, I was put into the interesting machine and it did its work. Later, still in my airy gown, I was encouraged to see the images assembled on a white screen in a darkened room. It appeared as though I had been sliced repeatedly like a large bolt of prosciutto, and I was reminded of an earlier time.

After fracturing my jaw in my early 20s while playing football, I acquired the X-ray prints of my skull from the oral surgeon. After my mouth had been wired shut and I began to dine on various purées, I'd place the X-rays against the windowpane. With equal measures of revulsion and fascination, I'd gaze upon the pencil-line break in my jawbone, my teeth with their bits of metal, the shadow of my brain.

I felt as though I were looking at my own corpse, my flesh sloughed away by time. This is what would be in my coffin some years later, I thought. The processes that went through my mind at the moment -- That's me? -- were managed by the very thing I was looking at, a picture of my gray skull's contents set starkly against a blue sky. This was unsettling, but I did not fully realize why until the internist showed me the CT scan images of my torso many years later, when I was much closer to the end of my average life span.

"There are your kidneys," he said, pointing at an image with a pen. "The right one's a little backed up from the stone, which you can see here." He pointed to a white dot near my bladder where the ureter emptied. "It's hung up. If it doesn't move within a few days, we'll have to do something mechanical."

I only nodded. I was not thinking of the "something mechanical," nor of the pain to come should the stone dislodge itself and travel. The pain had been only one component of the despair that followed my kidney-stone attack. The other, and perhaps more disturbing, revealed itself in that darkened room where I was made to confront the notion that we're all just a bunch of parts and slippery workings that are prone to failure like any other mechanism, and with pain usually added. I was also thinking of my own father's kidneys, which were destroyed by 20 years of diabetes and so killed him.

I was thinking, too, of my stepfather, who had died of cancer several years ago after a kidney stone sent him to the hospital -- where the routine X-ray, which I saw too, revealed the "well-defined mass" hovering in his ghostly lung. I had been with him in the emergency room while the kidney stone did its work and, over the next four months, while pain and his terminal illness and ultimately the morphine emptied him of himself. Even love, given or received, could not slice through the narcotic haze of pain or the staggering awareness of our own hopelessly mechanistic mortality. This will crush even the most positive of temperaments, the fiercest of wills.

Diagnostic images of my organs glowed on the walls. I got out of the viewing room and the hospital as fast as I could.

Three days later, the stone moved. I had been waiting for it. I had told myself that that tiny rock would not do to me what it had done earlier, that I would keep the upper hand and, in so doing, keep my conscience from seeping away. But before the pain medication kicked in, the pain scattered my mind, and all things but the pain became mere suggestions of themselves. The pain reduced me to a single inflamed nerve and little more. After it was gone, my self returned but an eerie feeling stayed with me. Our psychology, our spirituality, the value systems by which we live are only possible in the absence of ill health or pain. Our essence disappears into great pain, revealing all that we hold dear to be the most fragile of luxuries.
salon.com | April 27, 2000

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