The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

people and did too much; I thought I might try to cut back.
    At the end of August, I had an attack of kidney stones, an ailment that had visited me once before. I called my doctor, who promised to notify the hospital and to expedite my passage through the emergency room. When I got to the hospital, however, no one seemed to have received any notice. The pain of kidney stones is excruciating, and as I sat waiting, it was as though someone, having dipped my central nervous column in acid, was now peeling the nerves to their raw core. Although I described the pain I was in several times to several attendants, no one did anything. And then something seemed to snap in me. Standing in the middle of my cubicle in the New York Hospital emergency room, I began to scream. They put a shot of morphine into my arm. The pain abated. Soon enough, it returned: I was in and out of the hospital for five days. I wascatheterized four times; I was placed, ultimately, on the maximum allowed dose of morphine, which was supplemented with injections of Demerol every few hours. I was told that my stones did not visualize well and that I was not a candidate for lithotripsy, which would have eliminated them fast. Surgery was possible but it was painful and might be dangerous. I had not wanted to trouble my father, who was on holiday in Maine; now I wanted the contact with him, as he knew this hospital well from the days when my mother was always there, and could help with arrangements. He seemed unconcerned. “Kidney stones, those will pass, I’m sure you’ll be fine, and I’ll see you when I get home,” he said. Meanwhile, I did not sleep more than three hours any night. I was working on an enormous assignment, an article about deaf politics, and in a haze I talked to fact-checkers and editors. I felt my control over my own life slipping. “If this pain doesn’t stop,” I said to a friend, “then I’m going to kill myself.” I had never said that before.
    When I left the hospital, I was afraid all the time. Either the pain or the painkillers had completely undermined my mind. I knew that the stones might still be moving around and that I could relapse. I was frightened of being alone. I went with a friend to my apartment, collected a few things, and moved out. It was a vagabond week; I migrated from friend to friend. These people mostly had to go to work during the day, and I would stay in their houses, avoiding the street, careful never to go too far from the phone. I was still taking prophylactic painkillers and I felt a little crazy. I was angry at my father, angry in an irrational, spoiled, foul way. My father apologized for what I called his uncaring behavior and tried to explain that he had only meant to communicate his relief that I had a nonfatal disease. He said he had believed my relative stoicism on the phone. I entered a hysteria of which I cannot now make any sense. I refused to speak to him or to tell him where I had gone. From time to time, I would call and leave a message on his machine: “I hate you and I wish you were dead” was how they usually began. Sleeping pills got me through the nights. I had one small relapse and went back up to the hospital; it was nothing serious, but it scared me to death. In retrospect, I can say that that was the week I went bananas.
    At the end of the week, I headed up to Vermont for the wedding of some friends. It was a beautiful late-summer weekend. I had almost canceled the trip, but after getting details of a hospital near where the wedding was to take place, I decided to try to go. I arrived on Friday in time for dinner and square dancing (I did not do any square dancing), and I saw someone I had known very marginally in college ten years earlier. We talked, and I felt overcome with more emotion than I’d felt in years. I felt myself shining; I felt ecstatic and did not guess how nothinggood was to come of that. I rode from emotion to emotion in a way that was almost absurd.
    After the