Lithotripsy

Back again to the hospital for a lithotripsy, to have shockwaves spacked at my groin in order to dislodge or shatter or otherwise incommode the grumpy kidney stone that dwells there. This time the machine didn't work: the nurse tried turning it on and off again, and it still didn't work. It is not a pleasant feeling, when attached to a drip and stark naked under a few tonnes of x-ray / ultrasound machine, to see the operator remove her shoes, stand on a revolving office chair so that she can reach the top of a filing cabinet, and take down the instruction manual. A feeling of general unease only heightened when she then blows the dust off it. But all was well, and I had time to think about what the sound of the shockwaves was actually like. The rather Gogolian simile I came up with was that they sounded rather like a self-willed child hammering nails into a tin tray in order to create some form of art which you will then, as a parent, have to accept with a smile and display in a prominent position, even though it ends up resembling not anything close to art, but rather your best tin tray with a bunch of 6d casing nails hammered into it in seemingly random positions. But then again, the drugs were pleasantly strong.