Gout
March 13, 2026 at 11:58PMFor The Dial, in this excerpt from his chapbook, Jig, Jan Steyn, who is a translator by trade, writes of his experiences living with gout, a painful and frustrating medical condition. Sufferers are unable to flush uric acid out of the body effectively, leaving behind crystals that plague the skin and joints, causing inflammation, swelling, and pain.
In most bodies, excess uric acid leaves discreetly; in mine it lingers and precipitates, mainly in the joints. The resulting crystals are microscopic, the textbooks insist. I know this and still go about my day as if they were larger, because the word “crystal” insists on an image: coarse salt on a wind-scoured Namibian beach — white flats beneath a blown sky — lodged now in wrist, in toe, in small deposits under the skin. I picture them tearing at cartilage when I move; I picture movement grinding them down, like salt flakes crumbling between finger and thumb.
A theoretical knowledge of a disease is quite different from an embodied one. Knowing the word “tophus” is not the same as watching one rise, pearl-like, through your own skin. The terms were familiar to me, the lab values known, the protocols routine: NSAIDs and Colchicine for a flare-up, Allopurinol for maintenance; water, rest, weight loss, patience. Yet none of this teaches me how to stand up in the middle of the night on feet like pomegranates — granate in Afrikaans, “grenades” when translated back into English — red, swollen, seeded with glass shards, and ready to explode.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/03/13/gout/
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