When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

by Frank T. Vertosick Jr.

I don’t wish to put down CPR training. In rare instances—a near-drowning, a heart attack victim, a recent electrocution, a severe smoke inhalation—CPR and other resuscitation maneuvers save lives.

Pressure makes all the difference in the world.”

Unfortunately, the blossoming of our magnificent forebrains did not free us from the bondage of animal pain.

Pain lingers long after its biological usefulness has passed.

Pain can be gated from the brain by superimposing another sensation.

Napoleon, troubled in his later years by kidney stones, routinely burned himself with a candle to divert his attention from abdominal pain.

There is a profound difference between pain and suffering. All animals feel pain. Only humans suffer. Pain is a physical sensation; suffering is an emotional state induced by pain. Suffering is pain coupled with uncertainty,

depression, frustration, anger, fear, despair. We can have intense pain but not suffer.

The pain is the same, but the suffering is eased.

Medical school is five parts learning to one part servitude; the ratio is reversed in residency.

The more bizarre the description of the pain, the more likely it is to be a psychiatric delusion.

People with real pain don’t say ‘excruciating.’