My last blog post was a bit heavy. You know what else can be heavy….stones. There are all kinds of stones in this world. There are granite stones, sharpening stones, pizza stones, Rolling Stones… I could go on like Bubba from Forrest Gump but I think you get the idea. None of those stones are what I was thinking about though. Let’s talk kidney stones….ouch.
A few days after the September Scare in my previous post I woke up around 4 am with an absolutely terrible pain in the left side of my lower back that wrapped around to my abdomen. I thought to myself, “I must have been contorted the wrong way”. I flipped and flopped around the bed for about 30 minutes and the pain just kept getting more intense. I had never experienced a pain like this before. I have a decent pain tolerance but eventually found myself in the fetal position almost to the point of whimpering. I can tough this out. It’ll pass right? Well another 30 minutes later and I was reaching a threshold. My wife had just gone through something terrible and I can’t bother her with my petty pains. Ahhhhhh shit! This is not going away!! I nudged my peacefully sleeping beautiful pregnant wife awake. “Babe, I think I need to go to the hospital.” She barely asked a question and just started getting dressed. I’m the typical guy so me asking to go to the hospital means something is definitely wrong.
I hobble, bent over to the car and slump into the passenger seat. We make our way to the ER for the second time in less than a week. The nurses sit me down to take my vitals. My heart rate is elevated and my blood pressure is much higher than usual. Well, at least it’s not just in my head. “On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your pain?” they ask. Well, a 10 has to be completely unbearable about to die pain right? So, I say “I’m sitting at a constant 7 or 8 with no fluctuations.” I was in too much pain to notice but I’m sure the nurses were thinking, “weren’t they just here?”
To the exam room we go. I fall onto the hospital bed and get myself back into the semi-fetal position where the pain lessens to a solid 7. Here comes the IV morphine. I don’t even take tylenol or ibuprofen very often so this should settle me right down. Tick tock….it’s been at least 30 minutes and I don’t feel an ounce of relief. I’m not even drowsy or anything. I tell the nurse and she says, “maybe we can try something stronger”. Wait, what? There’s something stronger than morphine? Ok, let’s give it a try. Here comes Dilaudid. Yep, that does the trick. I still have some pain but my brain is definitely feeling a lot better about the whole situation now. Did I mention I woke up my pregnant wife before dawn to bring me to the hospital after she had just been to the ER days before? I just want to emphasize that. Not one question of, “are you sure” or anything from her. It’s go time, you need to go the hospital, then let’s do it.
The wait is now tolerable with this crazy wonder drug in my system now. Now it’s my turn for a sonogram. I don’t think there will be any tears of joy from this one though. Doctor looks over the scan and confirms the diagnosis. You have kidney stones. Yay for me!! That pain your feeling is the stones making their way from your kidney to your bladder. Oh jeebus!!! That means they will eventually need to leave my bladder too. SHIT!
Now it’s time to head to the pharmacy for some pain meds and go home and “relax”. I might also look into CBD, but I still need to go to services that provide medical marijuana cards in Tampa, FL for that. The meds helped and I was thankful for the “old people” adjustable bed we had bought a couple years earlier. The stones finished their journey to my bladder sometime later that day. The urologist I saw a day or two later told me to strain my urine to catch the stones when they made their ultimate exit. That sounds fun right? I dreaded trips to the bathroom for the next few days knowing I may end up crying on the floor covered in my own urine. My wife would come running in and I would hold up the stone proudly and say “I got that little bastard.”
It never happened. My bladder is a kidney stone dissolving internal organ juggernaut apparently. Thank you bladder. Maybe it was the stress from things that happened with my wife’s pregnancy, maybe it was something in my diet and maybe it was just my brain’s way of making sure I was as empathetic as possible for what my wife would have to endure in less than 8 months now, still I tried products like HHC gummies to fight stress and it helped me a lot. It wasn’t fun and it gave me a new scale for pain tolerance besides the root canal I once had where the dentist didn’t use enough novocaine but that’s a story for another time. If you want to know more about kidney stones, then head over to www.thekidneydocs.com/.
I think we’ll skip a few smaller incidents and FF to the “stay on your toes, January softball tournament” on the next installment.