Saturday Six – Things I Learned Getting a Kidney Stone

Welcome to the Saturday Six, where each week I let you get to know me a bit better with the help of a list. Any idiot can do a Top 5 list, which is why I kicked it up a notch to a Top 6. This week’s topic: Things I Learned Getting a Kidney Stone.

So this week isn’t really going to be nerdy or funny, at least not the type of funny I normally try to be with these things. Content has been lighter than usual the last few weeks, and I wanted to explain why. I also hope that maybe this is a little bit informative. If not, whatever, laugh at my pain. My extreme, gut wrenching pain. But be warned, this is a pretty personal and disgusting entry, so of course I have to share it with the entire internet.

1. It starts as a series of unconnected maladies – So two fridays ago I had a terrible stomach ache all morning long, it wasn’t too big a deal. Then at lunch I found out that Leonard Nimoy died, and I just assumed the stomach ache was, to mix sci-fi metaphors, my force sense tingling in premonition. I drank a Mountain Dew and thought no more of it. Then on Sunday there was a small local comic book show I went to, and spent several hours hunched over long boxes looking for deals. Afterwards, I went to dinner with friends at a Japanese ramen house. They didn’t have standard fat American chairs, they had traditional Japanese ones, which is basically just sitting on a box with a little cutout for your butt. This forces you to sit up straight with no back support. As soon as I sat down, I had terrible back spasms. I thought it was just a combo of the excessive posture from the chair and the hunching over comics all day, so took a walk around the block to walk it off, and fought through it. Also, for like a week, the head of my dick was sore (Hey, I warned you this got personal). I thought I had just had a particularly aggressive self-love session and rubbed it wrong, or that because I’ve put on a lot of weight lately and am too cheap to buy new pants, the ones I have that don’t fit quite right were cinching up and chafing me weird. Taken individually, all relatively normal things that can happen. Add them all together, and it’s a clear sign something is wrong.

 

2. Driving yourself to the hospital (twice) is the worst – I woke up the following Tuesday in tremendous pain. I still just thought it was muscle spasms. But I tried everything to get through them. I tried my massage chair, I tried a hot shower, I took some Aleve. Nothing. No matter how I positioned myself when I sat or laid down, the pain wouldn’t stop. So a quick Google search confirmed this was probably bad, and I should do something about it. Seeing as I wasn’t bleeding to death, I thought I’d be fine going to the big ass new Urgent Care campus they just built across from my work. This was a bad idea it turns out, because enough though it’s not a rinky chain and it’s affiliated with the major hospital network in the area, it had no diagnostic equipment (Ultrasound or CT scanner). So I then had to drive myself 8 miles in morning rush hour traffic to the nearest ER. In extreme pain. To a hospital I’d never been to. While not killing anyone else. It was extremely difficult. And then I had to park. It wasn’t until after I got in that I saw a tiny sign on the door that says “Valet Parking available, Inquire within”. That needs to be on a huge fucking billboard as you drive by the ER. They should paint it in the street like ‘Hey, are you dying, leave your car here, we’ll deal with it later”. If you can help it, get someone to drive you there. As it turns out, how you got to the ER can affect what treatments they give you. They didn’t want to give me the good drugs, and I was like “Fuck it, get me drugs now, I’ll get a ride later!” because the pain was so intense.

 



3. The pain makes you insane and a terrible person – So yeah, it’s really painful trying to express a little rock through a tube in your body it’s much too big for. I generally have a high pain threshold. I went and bought a car the same afternoon I had my wisdom teeth out like it was nothing. But this, this was something else. It felt so bad I wanted to grab an exacto knife and just start cutting things out of me to make the pain stop. It also made me insane. I kept feeling a compulsion to pee. But the flow was blocked, so nothing would come out. Which then made me try harder, which made the pain worse, so I’d sit down. But then when I stood back up, I had to pee again. Repeat over and over. I’m sure the other people in the waiting room in the ER thought I was nuts, as I’d go try to pee for 3 minutes, come out, watch half a game on Let’s Make a Deal, then right back into the bathroom. I ended up waiting about an hour and a half before I made it out of the waiting room. The entire time (when I wasn’t in the bathroom), I just keep looking around at the other people trying to evaluate my spot in line, which is a terrible thing to do. Like “Look at this kid in the wheelchair with the teddy bear, I’m way worse then him, I should go first”. Fortunately it was early in the morning, and this hospital was kinda out of the way, so there was no one with any life threatening stuff while I was there. No gunshots or heart attacks or anything. Mostly just old people and like slip and falls on ice. At least I think. I wasn’t really paying too much attention, what with the pain making me delirious and all my focus being on trying not to pass out.

 

4. If you aren’t immediately dying, the ER isn’t as concerned as you would like and there’s lots of down time – Fortunately, when I checked in and told them what was wrong, I got to go to triage immediately. It’s at this point I need to tell the young attractive nurse “My dick hurts and my back is spasming”, and then carefully step around saying that I’m at a 10 on the pain scale, so that all the pregnant women and people with broken femurs don’t come get me. I say I’m sure I could feel more pain, but this is the most I’ve ever felt. They then send me back out to the waiting room, I cycle through bathroom visits for while, and eventually a wing opens up in the back that they take me and 5 other people. At this point the nurse runs a presumptive test on what little amount of urine I could collect for a sample to see if there is any blood in it, and it immediately comes back positive. About 10 minutes later the Doc comes in, gives me a quick once over (including looking at my dick to make sure it’s fine), and schedules a CT scan. About twenty minutes later, they roll my ass into the big machine and scan my insides to confirm what is pretty clear. It takes about a half hour for the results back from the test. I have, in the doctor’s words “A small obstruction”. This is at right about noon. It’s not until this point I’m given any meds, so as not to mess up the tests. I’ve been in pain for about 5 hours. But these are some good ass meds. In about 15 minutes, I’m from about a 10 down to a 2. And pretty woozy, barely watching Divorce Court. I sleep for about an hour, when the nurse comes to check up on me, giving me another set of meds. It’s at this point I tell her I’ve yet to have anything to eat or drink today besides half a can of soda. After chiding me that soda is bad for my kidneys, she says not to worry, and everything is fine. Here’s where I would think they would give me an IV of fluids, try to get me superhydrated so I’d have something to push the little bugger out, as I can’t pee if I’ve had no liquids. And then if that didn’t work, we could do the ultrasound thing to smash it to bits. Nope. They just let me sleep for about 2 hours then told me I was good to go home. They got me stabilized, then kicked my ass out. Which is probabaly for the best to get as many people treated as possible, but I was expecting a little more.

 

5. Your body drastically overcompensates – Now that my brain knew what was wrong, it started to overcompensate. Before going home I stopped at the store and bought a ton of juice and prepared foods, as they told me to up my liquid intake and I didn’t want to be cooking while on medication and all I had in my house to drink was Pepsi. They put me on oxycodone, which just knocked my ass out cold. So I spent the rest of the night pretty much in a fog. It wasn’t until about 5 am when I was like “You know, I haven’t taken a dump all day.” My brain went “He’s right, we should do that!” and at this point, my stomach gurgled, and from then on for the next two days, it was nothing but diarrhea. I pretty much lost control of my asshole. There were no farts, just diarrhea. Anytime I had juice, 3 minutes later. Bam! Diarrhea. Which is just terrible. There’s a blockage in my dick, so you send everything out my asshole. How is that supposed to help unclog everything? There is nothing worse then being awoken in the middle of the night with diarrhea, not quite making it, having to clean it all up, and then getting yet more diarrhea. It was not a fun couple of days.

 

6. The effects linger long afterwards and change your daily routine – I felt perfectly fine after like a day or two. But it’s left me oddly paranoid about things. Did I just tweak my back or is that another contraction? Is there something different about the flow of my pee? Am I near a comfortable bathroom in case I get yet more diarrhea. These are just things I have to worry about now. Along with doing my best to avoid soda and other garbage, as now I know my kidneys are basically useless. So I got that going on for me.

 

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook