No judge in pronouncing the death sentence on a criminal ever dealt a more staggering blow. It fell upon me like an earthquake upon a tottering structure, and my emaciated physique proved unequal to the shock. The whirling in my head suddenly increased and in my weakened highly nervous condition when I thought of cutting in through the newly healed wound, an oppressive darkness settled over everything and for a brief space I passed out of the interview. When I came to, the first thing I noticed was that the air seemed fresh, and the ceiling had gone back to its normal height. Doctor Braasch regarded me with an anxious inquiring look. “Make it as quick as possible,” I said. “Lucky you discovered it.” “It was _you_ who made the discovery,” he frankly admitted. He then gave his orders to the nurse. Twenty minutes later I was on the operating table; Doctor Will and his staff, with a considerable audience of physicians, all in white masks and gowns, were standing in readiness, and a nurse was saying, “Now relax and take deep breaths.” The urgency was such that they broke all precedents of the institution, since kidney operations were never done there, and Doctor Will never operates in the afternoon, after operating in the morning. A dozen or so doctors from the clinic having heard of the _affaire extraordinaire_ came in to view the proceedings. Were it possible to relate in detail what followed the next few days it would only prolong agonizing scenes which would be more depressing than diverting to both the reader and the writer. If it be difficult for one with sympathetic tendencies to read of such harrowing experiences, it is doubly hard to write about them. They changed my nurse for two others more skilled in surgical cases. For the first time Doctor Will refrained from his customary jokes, and whenever he called his face wore a look of seriousness. He was plainly disturbed; he was also unusually tender and solicitous. From two or three sources my wife heard that kidney operations do queer things to people, and some Gloomy Gus assured her that even if I got well I’d be so peevish that no one could ever live with me. And on the fourth day after the second operation she chanced to hear one nurse remark to another in the corridor outside my door--“Isn’t it too bad that Doctor Will’s patient in Number 88 is going out!” Nowadays, hospital patients don’t _die_; they merely “_go out_.”