It's Coincidence

It's 2:35 am. I woke up about an hour ago in excruciating pain.

Now that it's subsided a bit and I seem to be finished crying, now that I'm off the phone with a brusque but reasonable nurse from Telehealth Ontario, who told me, among other things, that I didn't need to go to the emergency room, but that I needed to see my doctor tomorrow morning, now that I'm waiting for the magic blue pills to sweep their gelcap love through me, I am distracting myself from crying, from shaking my head to try to loosen the barnacle of pain on it, by writing to you.

Here's a question that stresses me out: On a scale of 1 to 10, how painful is it?

Is 10 the most pain I've ever been in? Or the most pain I can imagine? Because I've been pretty lucky and have an active imagination, so there's a pretty wide gap between the two.

I split the difference and said 7.