If all you are looking for this week is the cuteness of Megan, you can look at these first two pictures and move on. Here is Megan thinking she wanted to play in the snow
and then quickly changing her mind when she realized it was a little colder than was depicted on Caillou.
If you are still reading, be warned that a graphic discussion of kidney stones (including a couple pictures of said stones) can be found below.
Still here? Ok, you asked for it (I feel like Lemony Snicket telling you not to read this.)
A week ago (Friday the 7th) I woke up at 6:30 with stomach pains. Thinking that it would go away on its own, I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep (don't you hate waking up shortly before your alarm goes off?) That soon became impossible. I got out of bed and tried to walk up and down the stairs, sit on the toilet and get a drink. Nothing helped. By 6:50 I was pretty much in agony, and the pain was in my back on the right side. I crawled back into my room (literally) and woke up the resident RN that lives with me. It took her a few minutes to fully wake up and grasp the gravity of the situation, but soon she was alert and in nursing mode (the last time I woke her up like this was 5 years ago when I had put a knife almost all the way through my palm cutting through a frozen english muffin.) It took Kim very little time to decide that I probably had a kidney stone, and that we should go to the emergency room. Keep in mind that I NEVER go to the doctor, much less the ER. I kept telling her the pain would soon go away on its own. It didn't.
Fast forward to 7:30 and we were frantically driving to the hospital with me giving obnoxious, pained comments like, "ok, you can go now. pass that guy. get in the next lane. when is this light going to change colors." I'm pretty sure these annoying comments were the reason that Kim decided to drop me off at the ER before finding a parking spot (I don't blame her.) I limped into the ER fully expecting to have Nurse Cratchett sitting there and chewing gum while talking on the phone. She would then hand me a clipboard of paperwork to fill out without even looking up at me. I would take the clipboard and go sit in line behind all of the illegal immigrants who supposedly abuse "our" emergency rooms. Instead I dragged myself up to the window, and the nurse looked at me and said, "Do you need a doctor?" to which I responded "uhhhhh huhhhh." "Come around here," she said, and immediately began taking my blood pressure and telling the other nurse to get me a doctor. The two nurses standing there had concluded that I had a kidney stone before Kim and Megan even came in, and one of the nurses shared this wonderful bit of information with me: "I've had multiple kids and multiple stones, and stones are much MUCH worse."
Pretty much every nurse, CNA, doctor and janitor that I spoke with had also had kidney stones. The general consensus was "they suck." I was wheeled back into a little room with a door for a curtain, and pretty soon I was harassing Kim about when I might get some kind of pain killers. Since Kim and Megan couldn't provide me any relief, I began talking loudly enough to be heard through the little curtain door, saying things like "Are they ever going to bring me something? Don't they know how bad this is? Did my nurse stop to talk to someone on the phone? WHERE IS HE!" Kim hung her head in shame and refused to tell any of the staff that she is a nurse. I'm sure at this point that she was very glad that we had not gone to her hospital.
The nurse "soon" came back in and hooked up an IV, first giving me an anti-nausea medication (people with kidney stones often start vomiting from sheer pain. nice, eh?) and then something that took the edge off the pain. Meaning that it still felt like a 300 pound gorilla was grinding his knuckle into my back. The medications made me sleepy, and I fell asleep as they wheeled me off to take a CT scan. Through the haze I could tell that my nurses were worried about the fact that I was not being very modest about my robe being open while I was heading down the hall. Admittedly, it was pretty low on my priority list. To take the CT scan I had to haul myself from my gurney to the bed of the scanner (isn't somebody supposed to help me do that?) and I immediately fell asleep again in the scanner. The tech then woke me up and made me transfer myself back to my bed. Keep in mind that I was sleeping because of the medication, but the pain still had not subsided. Back in my room Kim had the nurse give me some Toradol (an anti-inflammatory straight from heaven) which finally took the rest of the pain away. The doctor came into confirm that I had a kidney stone, gave me a prescription for Percocet
a strainer to pee through
and sent me on my way with the knowledge that the cause of most kidney stones is "idiopathic" (which comes from the Latin for "I am an idiot") Translated: they don't know what causes stones, they don't know what to do to prevent stones (besides the totally generic advice of "eat right and stay hydrated") and they have no idea how long it will take to pass a stone.
Kim took me home and put me to bed, where I slept for 5 or 6 hours.
She had me start carrying around a nalgene to keep hydrated (because the stone was making me pee about every 1/2 hour)
Sadly, kidney stones serve no master. They cause pain whenever they want, but in between crying sessions you can't really tell there is anything wrong with you (besides the previously mentioned increase in urination.) Everything you've heard about kidney stones feeling like "pissing barb wire" is completely false. The pain is felt in the kidney as the stone passes through the ureter to the bladder because it is blocking the flow of fluid and backing up the kidney. Once the stone is in the bladder (and as it is expelled through the urethra) there is no pain.
Learning this did not keep me from thinking of this Seinfeld clip every time that I went to the bathroom. (All I could find was the full episode, so fast forward to the end if you want to see Kramer passing his kidney stone at the circus and screaming so loud that the guy on the tightrope falls off.)
I decided pretty quickly that the value of "catching" my stone so that the doctor could analyze it was a lower priority than avoiding the embarrassment of straining my urine every 30 minutes at work (and carrying the strainer around in my bag), so when my stone finally came out I almost missed it. Luckily I was paying attention, and was able to fish it back out of the urinal using a paper towel (gross I know, but if I hadn't done it you wouldn't be able to see the following pictures.)
So here it is, the 2 mm stony mineral concretion that caused me so much trouble. It is the black fleck at the bottom of the specimen bottle.
The little bugger was so small that it was very difficult to take a picture of. I tried some special lighting and messed around with all the settings on my point-and-click camera to get this shot.
An here it is next to honest Abe to give you some perspective.
So the final word on kidney stones? Don't get them. And if you do, get some pain medication (and hopefully some Toradol) as quick as you can. And I don't know if stones actually are worse than childbirth, but if they're even in the same ballpark all women giving birth should make sure to GET AN EPIDURAL, it is totally not worth feeling the pain for experience's sake.
