I guess I should've gone to the emergency room.

The thing is that I don't see doctors, I don't go to hospitals, much less emergency rooms. And it turns out the quote from Northern Exposure is really true that the human body is a wonderful healing machine and the role of doctors is often just to give a patient peace of mind (or to administer drugs to alleviate pain in modern society). I forget if it was Leonard or Uncle Anku who said it.

I don't even know how to go about "going to an emergency room". In the worst of it, when I thought it might be necessary, I had stuffed a few things in a backpack to be ready to grab to run out into the pouring rain and catch a cab and tell them to take me to the nearest hospital. Is that even right? Or is that the point when you call 911?

The rain was actually a really interesting part of the whole incident because it was a perfectly sunny day. I wasn't surprised when I started hearing rain outside because that would still be normal for Taipei weather, but it was raining pretty hard and it was still sunny outside. I kept walking out into the hallway where I can see outside, asking, "How is it raining?, it's totally sunny out there", and I looked for a rainbow and found it and assumed the rain would end shortly. But it didn't, and when the pain started it kept raining and poured through the whole 4-5 hour ordeal.

That kind of rain was strange and I wonder if it wasn't a factor in discouraging me from going to the hospital. But going to the hospital is simply unthinkable for me. Even when I was preparing for it just in case it got that bad, I didn't really think I would or could do it.

I started having sharp abdominal pains and at first I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was intestinal, not uncommon in Taiwan. It's worse when it occurs when I'm out, but I was still home. I figured I'd feel some sharp pain, go to the bathroom and it would clear up and I'd feel fine in short order.

It was just like the pain when that happens, but it didn't let up and started to increase. It was like someone was gripping and squeezing and twisting whatever internal organ – stomach, intestines, liver – and it also occurred to me it might be appendicitis, which if you don't take care of your appendix ruptures and you die.

The pain increased as twilight turned to night outside my window. I'm not a screamer. I would probably scream under torture, but not internal bodily pain. I groan and I writhe.

And then I found it true that meditation techniques do help manage pain. It wasn't a conscious thought process of, "Oh, this hurts, I think I'll go into meditational equipoise to manage the pain with my mind". It was more visceral. I was sweating so much from the pain that I had the air conditioner on even though the cold air was uncomfortable. But I found myself in a position on my bed with my palms flat on the mattress, and I started visualizing the pain as energy and then directing the energy through my palms into the mattress.

From a modern science point of view it's a distraction technique. You mentally occupy yourself in a way that makes you feel better by not thinking about the pain. But when you actually try the method and even marginally think you're succeeding, there is a sense that qigong, or taichi, or even Tibetan descriptions of energy flow are real and are an important part of our being.

I was basically in that meditational state for a good 3-4 hours, focusing on mind and controlling the pain energy and directing it into the mattress. It also occurred to me that before directing the pain energy into the mattress, I had to think of the energy positively since I didn't want to discharge negative energy anywhere, even into an inanimate object. So I reminded myself that pain is good, it tells us and warns us when we're in distress and we need to do something about it, so while discharging the pain energy into the mattress, I was also thanking it.

I don't know what I think of that now, that's just what was going through my mind at the time. It may be just an indication of my own subjective mind, rather than some objective reality. But then that's the way it would be for all of us.

It started to alleviate about 9 in the evening when there were clearer moments when the pain subsided. There were several trips to the bathroom through all this. I think the grand finale was vomiting when I hadn't eaten anything in almost 24 hours and what came up didn't look like the only thing I had ingested, which was coffee with cream. A lot of blackness.

If that incident was an earthquake, I continued to feel aftershocks for over 24 hours and even into today, but now it seems to be completely gone. I'm not sure what to make of it and since I didn't go to the emergency room like a normal person would have or if I lived with other people, I'll never know.

I don't know what triggered it. All through the 24 hour period of "aftershocks" when the pain would re-emerge and I'd get worried if it would get blown out of proportion again, I wondered if this was liver failure. I read that a stage of liver failure may include "pain on the liver" but it made no mention of "excruciating pain on the liver".

But now if it seems it's not continuing, then it's not liver failure. Actually, I'm not totally writing it off just yet. I'm not going to say that it's totally gone just yet. It just seems mostly gone at this point, but I still feel something. That said, if it's not liver failure, then the only thing I can identify as being a trigger is what I ingested right before it started, which is a single cup of bottled iced coffee with an artificial liquid creamer.

Focusing on the creamer, there was a recent scare in Taiwan in the past few months of unscrupulous foodmakers putting something bad in their products that caused health problems in a bunch of people. Some plasticizer. It was big news, but being a foreigner I only get the translated news. I worked at an English-language newspaper and can testify the most experienced Taiwanese writers of English-language news can only express at a level at least one step removed from a native English reporter.

I didn't think the news applied to me. From the TV reports it looked like it was mostly about bottled drinks and the store where I buy bottled drinks is reputable and posted signs that ostensibly said that their products had been inspected and were safe. I never saw non-dairy coffee creamer in those reports. 

However, I now can imagine what it was like for those victims, that if some toxic substance was added to a food product and wreaked havoc on their liver or kidneys upon ingestion, that their family members would have rushed them to the emergency room.

If I was living with family in Kaohsiung, I might have successfully resisted being sent to the emergency room because I'm not a screamer. I can keep it in in a way that other people wouldn't panic, but otherwise I imagine that they would have called 911.

Then there were my thoughts that I might die . . .