He was a fat man, very brave, and a good officer, although addicted to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire, with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me. They had had an argument one time about our Lord never sending you anything you could not bear and some one’s theory had been that meant that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically. But he had always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson until he gave him all his morphine tablets that he had always saved to use himself and then they did not work right away.

From “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway

This vivid paragraph is Hemingway’s masterful description of a man’s suffering from extreme pain. It brings to the fore the uselessness of the preconceived notions we have all been bombarded with throughout our lives as we confront a cruel reality—the reality as cruel as the torturing slowness of time when the clutches of pain grab us.  “But he had always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson …”

This snippet reminds me of one of my patients who was a fortune teller. She became very ill and pain besieged her. Every day, in her deathbed, she asked the same question,

“When, Doctor, when am I going to die?”

Even her clairvoyance did not help her foresee the end of her suffering.