I am sorry to hear about your renal colic. I believe it can be extremely painful—so much so that morphia is inadequate and the victim has to be given chloroform. Having once been threatened with something like this, I have taken good care to drink plenty of liquid, enough to keep my urine more or less colourless.
Yes, it is a dangerous thing indeed to possess a body. So long as we have it we are at the mercy of violent and prolonged sufferings of one kind or another. You now have direct experience of the fact that the possession of a genito-urinary tract is very much of a mixed blessing. Suppose you had to pay for the pleasures in bed that you can get from it with a monthly attack of renal colic—would you think it a price worth paying? And yet the majority of women don't seem to be put off their pleasures by the prospect of childbirth, which, I believe, is no less painful than renal colic. Perhaps if the pleasure and the pain came together we might think twice before indulging ourselves. It is no wonder that the Buddha said 'One who lays down this body and takes hold of another body, he I say is blameworthy' (M. 144: iii,266 & KAMMA [b]).
I have just been given the English translation of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). About five hundred pages. It should keep me occupied for some time.
