Pain

  I know something about my body.  If I eat something, and it doesn't agree with me, it usually starts to tell me after four hours.  I went to Arby's for a late lunch one day and had a roast beef sandwich.  I didn't see or taste anything unusual in the meat, but I did four hours later.  I had food poisoning.  Both ends of the spectrum were telling me this.  I knew what food poisoning was, since I had a severe bout of it, when I was in seminary.  If you haven't had it, I pray you never will.  My roommate took me to the hospital because of my condition.  I told the doctor what had happened, and where I had eaten.  He called Arby's to report the incident and was sending two health officers over there to seize the meat.  If it had happened to me, then surely it had happened to others who had eaten there.  Arby's said they knew nothing about it (of course).  When the officers got there, they were told they had thrown the meat away.  No evidence.  They did put Arby's on notice.

 A couple of months later, I experienced the worse pain of my life.  Worse than the doctor doing an operation on me, when I was a kid, without anesthetic.  My roommate took me back to the hospital.  They did a battery of tests and found I had kidney stones.  I am told that the pain is the equivalent of women undergoing childbirth.  If that is the case, then I feel for them.  It was horrible.  I was sent home with some pain meds and told to drink lots and lots of water to flush the stones out.  I was also told to cut down on caffeine, because apparently it helped the stones to develop.  No more soda drinks or sweet tea for a while.  Just water.  After a couple of days, the stones passed.  Little bits of what looked life sand.  It was amazing to me how something so small could cause so much pain.  That's where the analogy of childbirth differs.  Thankfully, the stones weren't as big as babies.