A couple of weeks ago, I was the attending nephrologist for our hospital consultation service when I met Mr. Jones. He had suffered a severe heart attack. His heart was stunned into stillness and couldn’t effectively pump oxygen-filled blood to his kidneys or any of his other parts for the however many minutes it took for the ambulance to get to him and start resuscitation. Once he was transferred to the hospital, the cardiologists successfully reopened the major coronary artery responsible for the attack, but his kidneys weren’t working as well as they had been before. But his kidneys were the least of his troubles. My interaction with his family reminded me of an experience in my own life from about twenty years prior.