'Without Any Sense of My Old Pain'

Two weeks ago a colleague was feeling ill around lunch time. He’s no hypochondriac, though not so much brave as stoical. He rightly assumes that no one, including himself, wants to listen to him complain. He figured it was flu, and only reluctantly agreed to see his doctor. Diagnosis: kidney stone. He passed one some years ago and swears it was more painful than labor, a condition he knows from close, painless observation. The doctor gave him pain meds and told him not to drive, just wait. He stayed home for a week, waiting, and nothing happened. Then last Thursday he went in for a second CT-scan and, voila, the stone was gone. Had it not passed he was booked for surgery Friday morning.

From a young age, Samuel Pepys, like his mother, brother and uncle, was plagued by kidney and bladder stones. When the pain flared, he called his condition “fits of the stone.” Finally, on March 26, 1658, at the age of twenty-five, he consented to have the bladder stone removed. Without anesthesia, in an age ignorant of sepsis, Dr. Thomas Hollier performed a lithotomy, removing a stone reported to be the size of a billiard ball through a three-inch incision between Pepys’ scrotum and anus. Just writing about it gives me the willies. Pepys was fully recovered in five weeks, though the operation appears to have left him sterile. He celebrated each subsequent March 26 with what he called a “stone feast.” Pepys began keeping his diary almost two years later. In the first sentence of the first entry, Jan. 1, 1660, he refers obliquely to his stone:

“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.”

Pepys lived until 1703. He suffered pain at the site of the old incision during the final three years of his life. A month before his death, Pepys wrote to his nephew: “It has been my calamity for much the greatest part of this time to have been kept bedrid, under an evil so rarely known as to have had it matter of universal surprise and with little less general opinion of its dangerousness; namely, that the cicatrice [OED: “scar of a healed wound”] of a wound occasioned upon my cutting for the stone, without hearing anything of it in all this time, should after more than 40 years’ perfect cure, break out again.”

A post-mortem found seven stones weighing four and a half ounces in Pepys’ left kidney. My father had a friend, a retired police officer, who carried his stones in a small glass bottle and would rattle them at children when he had had enough to drink.