Pain

Here's another tale of toughness from inside the Orioles' clubhouse. Manager Buck Showalter said he had two different lineup cards filled out just more than 30 minutes before the first pitch of the Orioles' 12-2 win over the Blue Jays on Wednesday - one with shortstop J.J. Hardy in it and another without. For the past two days, Hardy has been dealing with a painful hangnail on his right middle finger, and on Wednesday Hardy said it became so difficult to throw that he was gripping the ball with just three fingers.

WASHINGTON -- First, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden, D-Del., had the national headache of presiding over the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Then at 2 a.m. Saturday, he had a root canal.Committee aides said that one of Biden's teeth began hurting while he was presiding over the first day of hearings Friday. The pain in the tooth got so bad that early Saturday morning Biden called a dentist. But a few hours after the root canal, he was back on the job -- though when out of public sight, a friend said, "he was wearing a big ice pack on his mouth."

WHEN Ross Perot quit he freed President Bush and Governo NotBush to avoid the subject, and they have since been avoiding it with zest. The subject, of course, is: "What's it going to take to haul the economy out of the pit?"Mr. Perot decided the answer was, "Sacrifice." The word gives off noble vibration, but everybody knows that, after we enjoy the pleasure of being called to sacrifice, pain cometh swiftly to all but the canny and the well connected. That's why seasoned politicians handle sacrifice gingerly.

Jesse Ventura looks into the camera and says, "I like to call wrestling a ballet of violence."That's what passes for a message, insight or truth in this two-bit, cut-and-paste made-for-TV movie about the life of the wrestler-turned-governor of Minnesota airing tomorrow night from 9 to 11 on NBC.Well, there's also this: "Pain is good. Extreme pain is extremely good." Or how about, "nothing is forever"? Beyond the fact that "The Jesse Ventura Story" celebrates violence, it also includes what is hands-down the worst narrative device of the television season -- having the actor playing Ventura (Nils Allen Stewart)

NOT LONG AGO, I spent an unnerving evening with three men who insisted on discussing their vasectomies.I don't know how we got on the subject. One minute we were watching Scottie Pippen of the Bulls swoop toward the basket, and the next minute this guy Steve was asking: "You ever had a vasectomy?""Excuse me?" I said."A vasectomy. Where they cut your . . ."I know what it is," I said. "I just can't figure out why you're bringing it up now. Did Scottie Pippen have a vasectomy?"As it turned out, no one knew whether Scottie Pippen had had a vasectomy.

WASHINGTON -- Jack Kevorkian's 33rd victim, Rebecca Badger, was just 39 years old.She was, she said, so crippled by the effects of multiple sclerosis that she relied on a wheelchair and had to be dragged by her daughter to the bathroom. She had difficulty with bladder and bowel control and was in constant, unbearable pain. Ms. Badger turned to Jack Kevorkian as an ''angel of mercy'' to free her.On July 9, in a hotel room in Pontiac, Mich., Dr. Kevorkian administered an injection of potassium chloride, and Ms. Badger died, holding her daughter's hand.

Traysi Lenee, a 26-year-old actress from Washington, had a roomful of black women in tears this weekend at Martin's West.Born to a 16-year-old mother, she grew up doubting that her family, and the rest of the world, really wanted her. Sometimes she thought she was ugly.To compensate for feeling unwanted and unattractive, she became extremely friendly. She became involved in empty relationships, had more abortions than she could count. Four times, she slit her wrists.The women who heard her, all of them gathered for a two-day workshop called "Tapping the Power Within," supported her with cheers and cried when her words mirrored their own pain.

Berlin.--It's a shame Americans are paying so little heed to Europe, especially to Germany. The president's summer tour was merely a blip on the screen. Crisis journalism since has had little time for political events that in calmer times would be followed with great anxiety.For what happens here will shape the future of Europe, and thus of the United States, and thus of much of the present and would-be developed world.Only a few nations meet that standard: The U.S., of course; Britain, France, Japan, China, Russia, maybe Ukraine.

Recent discoveries could change the way scientists and doctors view pain."Pain is not just a symptom of an injury," says Allan Basbaum, chairman of the department of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. "Under some conditions, it's really a disease of the nervous system."What Basbaum is saying is that pain nerves, when we're injured, seem to subtly change. And those changes, if they stick around, can set people up for longer-term misery -- misery that might be avoided if the initial pain were nipped in the bud.Such nipping should be easier in the future.

Scientists working on the phenomena of pain have begun to explore the possibility of placing more emphasis on suppressing pain before it reaches the receptors in the brain by blocking the path of the nerve impulses. A key reason scientists are so eager to stop pain signals before they reach the brain is that they understand so little of what happens inside the brain.Dr. Kenneth L. Casey, professor of neurology and physiology at the University of Michigan, has been trying to use a PET Scan imaging technique to try to paint a picture of pain inside the human brain.