Rollin' with the Stones...

Kidney Stones that is.  My dad gets them all the time, and I never quite grasped the pain he was in until about 4 a.m. on Sunday morning.

O.M.G.

It felt like someone punched me in the back, no wait the front, no... the back again... was someone playing ping pong in my gut?  Or as the nurses referred to it, my "right flank."

Poor David.  I woke him up to tell him I was in pain, and that I didn't want to go to the hospital around 4:30am.  Then about an hour later, after trying to rest in every possible position, on the bed, the couch, and even the floor in both bathrooms, I woke him back up and told him he had to take me to the hospital.

I somehow calmed myself on the car ride over to the hospital to the point where David turned to me and asked me if it was really necessary?  "Yes. It. Is. Necessary," I spat.  I could barely breathe!

The nurses admitted me immediately, got me hooked up to an IV (I've got the marks to prove it, thank you, to the male nurse with plumber hands) and shot me full of morphine... Ah, sweet morphine!

Only, it didn't quite have the effect I was going for.  It only dulled the sharpness... but the pain was still there.  I felt like Lady Macbeth wanting to yell at the nurses- "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"  That last bit was a combination of the Morphine and having just been at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival... As a side note, the production of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" was very good, I was very sad and embarrassed to leave during the intermission due to pain in my gut... but then, lately, what's new?

They sent me for a CAT Scan.  And when I came back they pumped me full of more morphine... Ah sweet morphine!  There you are... it finally kicked in!

It was right when I was just drifting into a beautiful morphine induced slumber that the doctor came in... "You have a kidney stone. It's 3mm in size, and you're just going to have to pee it out, so we'll send you home with some pills to manage the pain, some pills to help you pee, and some pills for the nausea that the other pills will make you feel."

(Thick sarcasm) Lovely.

Great.  They took out the IV and sent us on our merry way.  I slept ALL DAY Sunday.  Minus an hour here and an hour there.  I was out cold.  Any time I woke up I was nauseated or trying to go pee, which was more like dribbling... tinkle tinkle tinkle.  So I figured I'd just try to sleep the stone out of my body.

In the evening I ate some food and drank the juice that David brought home.  That was a mistake!  I vomited all night long.  All night long and all morning long.  Until 9am or so, when my doctor's office finally opened and I called them in desperate need for help!

They said they were sorry I felt so bad, but that they couldn't really do anything for me and they sent me back into the ER.  Obviously they'd (the ER) given me something that wasn't sitting right in my gut, and I was also clearly dehydrated.

So I spent from 9:30 this morning until 3 or 3:30 this afternoon strapped to a hospital gurney wearing an ever so fashionable hospital gown, getting poked and prodded and told nothing much... only that they had pumped me full of two liters of saline and that they were changing my nausea meds and I still had to go home and pee in the strainer and look for gold- I mean a kidney stone... Oy!

I am headed to bed now.  Please wake me when its all over!