The doctor tapped his desk thoughtfully for a moment, then suddenly
his face lit up with some brilliant thought and he wrote out orders
for five more examinations. Though I had won my point I didn’t like
the contented smile with which he handed them to me. I went out
felicitating myself on having cleverly side-stepped the stomach test,
but a few hours later I discovered the cause of his merriment, for I
walked right into another, much worse--a cystoscopic examination--where
they insert something that feels like a piece of rusty barbed wire into
the bladder and up through the ureter into the kidney. Affixed to the
inner end of this ingenious apparatus--which has an opening through the
center--there is a tiny electric light bulb, by means of which they
get a view of the interior furnishings. To facilitate this they dilate
the parts by pumping in air, soda, transparent acids and suchlike
pain-producing inventions.
The process of exploring by alternately probing, twisting, pumping and
expanding the inside membraneous walls of the kidney is unpityingly
pursued as long as the victim remains conscious; and up to this point
is as far as I am able to give an account of the performance. In fact
there is no use attempting further to describe it, because no printable
language can do it justice.
They don’t like to give an anesthetic in this case, for the reason
that you can suffer more and they claim they can get better results
without it. It’s like the old-fashioned idea that in confinement cases
anything given to mitigate the pain is apt to injure the child. The
only near-humorous feature that I discovered in the whole procedure was
the remark of one of the examining physicians, that he didn’t think it
would hurt--much.
There was a pet expression that he used repeatedly: whenever he gave
the vitals a vigorous probe that involuntarily tightened every muscle
and nearly lifted me off the operating table he would say, “Now
_relax_, please.”
I asked why they called it an examination instead of an operation.
He said it sounded less painful; and if the patients knew it were
an operation they would either refuse to take it, or else insist on
being etherized. When it was over, the only report I could get was,
that it was “satisfactory” (to them at least), and that the kidney was
“still functioning.” They gave me another bottle of castor oil and
put me to bed for twenty-four hours to recuperate and muster strength
for the next examination. The doctor assured me that castor oil was
very “cleansing,” and he warned me that any substitute might prove
injurious. I didn’t think to inquire if he had an interest in the
drugstore where they sold it.
After recovering from this and the four examinations that followed I
felt that every part of me had been subjected to a scrutiny as thorough
as it was painful, and I became positively convinced that whatever else
ailed me, I was threatened with sheer nerve exhaustion. I never dreamed
there were so many painfully expert methods of examining the interior
of a human being.