Geeee-zus, Gnu! That looks dreadful, and I bet it felt like the end of the world couldn't come fast enough.

I was an army medic back in the Cold War. During an exercise in Germany, I saw an MO deal with a middle-aged warrant officer's kidney stone in a delightfully direct fashion: he loaded up a syringe with morphine and gently pumped it into that big vein in the elbow until the poor fellow lay back, relaxed and smiled.

"All the diagnostic tests in the world won't do a blind bit of good if the patient dies of shock on the way there," he said.