Imagine me holding a plier, clamped against your lower gum right beneath your teeth. From time to time I'll squeeze it gently. But when time is up (say about 40 minutes) I squeeze the plier with all my strength.

That's what I had to live with last week. Except the plier was bacteria with an attitude problem in my inflamed gum. The pain was so intense I had to stop my car by the roadside to breath; the sight was not pretty. If there was a pass-out button I could press, I would have.

The only solace I could find was I didn't have to suffer this along with insomnia.

Corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's quote, sufficiently intense pain is indistinguishable from recreational drug.

When physical pain comes, you're thrown into a state of involuntary meditation. There is no room for anything else in the mind except this pain. This focus is clean and total.

You zone out in order to cope. In doing so you're spiritually displaced. The mental zone you're in is free of the usual nonsense you're not sure it's entirely a bad place.

Time distorts and dilates. The day feels longer, maybe because every jolt of pain becomes an event. Kairos completely overpowers chronos.

Fuse is short. Part of the suffering is having to hold back your temper and snap. I almost didn't make it here.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but the pain was so life-changingly intense I had no choice but to try and draw something out of it.

Pain at this scale make you question the price of life.

There has to be an upside to this, I'm still in search of it.