12:52 pmKidney Stones Rock
Not really.
Several years ago my hubby was on a business trip in California. One morning while he was gone, I got a phone call. Jon’s boss was on the other line.
“Suzette?”
That’s what he thought my name was. For five years. After a while it became too awkward to correct him. So I let him call me Suzette. Anyway…
“Suzette?”
“Yeah….?”
“Have you spoken with Jon yet today?”
“No…”
“Well, I don’t want to alarm you, but he is in the ER here in Santa Cruz. He had some severe abdominal pain this morning…”
And then I stopped hearing most of what he was saying. My poor sweetie was in the ER in Santa Cruz, California. Which, have you ever been to Santa Cruz? Cool place to visit. Hippies riding bikes everywhere. A really great ice cream shop called Marianne’s. A great seafood place called Stagnaro’s on the end of the wharf. Oh, and homeless people sleeping on the beach under your hotel balcony, making you feel really guilty about having both a house AND money to go on vacation. It’s a cool little place. But it’s not a place you want to entrust with your health care. I imagine the Santa Cruz ER to be only a half-step up from, say, a free clinic in Guatemala. Only recently did Jon tell me that his ER doctor had a Grizzly Adams beard and the posters on the walls of the ER were all about psychedelic mushrooms. Anyhoo, several ex-rays, a bottle of Lortab, and a hideous flight later, my husband was back home… writhing in agony, waiting for several kidney stones to pass. I’ll skip the details of the few days that followed, but suffice it to say that it’s the worst pain I’ve ever seen him in. I felt horrible for him, and there wasn’t anything I could do.
So fast forward to last week. I woke up Thursday morning with some signs of a UTI. That would be urinary tract infection, for those of you fortunate enough to not get them and therefore don’t know the cool anagram associated with them. (And don’t worry, I’ll try not to give TMI about this whole thing.) So I call the doctor — my baby doctor — and ask them what I should do. They tell me to come in and do a pee test. So I do that… but again, for those of you who have ever had a UTI, you know it’s almost impossible to pee more than three drops at a time, especially on demand… you’re sitting there holding a tiny cup, imagining the nurse standing outside the door with her arms folded, tapping her foot impatiently. But I do what I can under the circumstances. Then the nurse comes out to me and pulls me aside and says some stuff, and uses the phrase “there was a ton of blood”.Then she asks me, “Have you been contracting?” And I thought that was a little weird, because indeed I had. I’d been having between three and four an hour. And she says, “If you start having pain in your back, or if you start contracting 6 or 8 times an hour, you need to go to the ER. The doctor thinks it may be a kidney stone.”
So I get my antibiotic and go about my day, not feeling great, but not feeling too bad. But as the afternoon progressed, I started feeling really, really, REALLY not good. My back started aching like my kidney was going to explode. And I was contracting more. So I tried to call Jon, but he was in a meeting. Imagine that… working at work. The nerve, right?!? So I start kind of panicking. I called my mother-in-law (who lives one street over) on her cell and asked her if she was home from work yet. And I was trying to sound all casual, but I couldn’t NOT cry while I talked, and she was like, “Are you okay?” And I just said, “No.” But she wasn’t quite home yet. But she hung up and called my father-in-law, who squealed into my driveway 3 minutes later. Bless him. So I call Jon’s cell again and leave a message, telling him what was going on, and all the while still trying to sound casual. (A playback of my message later allowed me to hear just how un-casual I actually sounded.) And I walked outside and tried to not cry because Zoe was playing with a neighbor kid in the front yard and I didn’t want to freak them out. But again, try as I may, I couldn’t NOT CRY, because with every step I took, it felt like my kidney would explode. And Zoe was all, “What’s wrong?” And I just said, “Grandpa is going to take me to the doctor.” And then Jon’s sister pulled up in front of the house to watch the kids while I went. Have I mentioned how much I appreciate that several of Jon’s family members live literally around the corner? So we get to the ER and check in and Jon gets there and he and his dad go back to the little room with me. And a chick comes up from Labor and Delivery (just called “L&D”around the hospital) and hooks me up to the fetal monitor to watch the baby. And they ask me a million medical questions, including a few personal, kinda-sexy ones, and I answered honestly, hoping my father-in-law wasn’t paying attention. And a guy-nurse came in and asked me if I wanted some pain medication. I said, “That would be great”, and always said please and thank-you to the people coming and going, because my mother always taught me that even if it feels like you are half-dying, you should still be polite. But I felt very impolite when the ER doctor was rapping on my kidney to see if I had any visible reaction to it. My first reaction was to kick him in the head, but I didn’t. Then I felt impolite again when the shot of morphine went in and I immediately felt like I was falling through the bed and through the floor and the nurse was still asking me questions in rapid succession, and I just wanted to yell “Give me a damn minute!” And then I felt bad for having a morphine shot because I imagined the baby feeling like he was falling out my back and through the bed and through the floor… and was I making him stupid?? It was a lot of things to feel in just a few short minutes. But as the morphine took the edge off and people left the room I felt much better.
And then me, my hubby, and my father-in-law all sat there for four hours.
The prognosis there at the ER was that the baby was probably sitting on things he wasn’t supposed to be sitting on, and it was blocking both of my kidneys. But I was to see a urologist the next day.
So I did. And I didn’t like that man very much. Jon liked him, but I did not. He was a know-it-all… which you would actually think you’d want your doctor to know-it-all, but really he just came across as a jerk. He was condescending. And he said he wanted to slap his nurse. And the fact that he probably did know a lot about kindeys and bladders and their connecting tubes, it didn’t matter to me. Being a girl, it is far more important that the doctor be nice as opposed to smart. Which is dumb, but the truth.
So the know-it-all urologist said that I “probably” had a kidney stone. But there was no real way to tell, except for me to take this big bowl home and hang it on the toilet seat and then take this strainer and make like I was panning for gold. And if in four weeks I hadn’t struck gold, maybe it wasn’t a kidney stone and I should come back in and he’d do some surgery. So I thanked him (always be polite), and kicked him in the knee cap, and left the office with my big toilet bucket and strainer. Actually, I waited until after he gave me a prescription for Percocet before I kicked him in the knee cap. Then I left the office, holding on to Jon, crying as I thought about living through the miserable pain for four frickin weeks. And then Jon cried as he thought about taking care of me for four frickin weeks. But seriously? He was the best nurse ever. And I’m not just saying that. He was a sweetheart. He took the kids to all of their activities, brought me food in bed, and hooked up the hacked X-Box in our bedroom so I could play games and watch downloaded movies and TV shows. (Completely unrelated: I watched all of the back episodes of “Burn Notice” and really like it.) And after all of that worrying, I was only sick for about 3 1/2 days. Not four weeks.
Saturday I struck gold. Well, not really “gold” so much as “sand”. Which was odd, because I was expecting a huge, jagged rock to appear… what with all the pain like I was dying. But no, it was sand. Which apparently still makes you feel like you’re dying when you pee it.
Now ask me how many times my mother and grandmother have told me to stop drinking Diet Coke. Because they are convinced that Diet Coke is the culprit. Even though kidney stones are made of calcium. And unless Coke has recently undergone a healthy recipe change, it still pretty much has zero calcium. Nope, I think we may have the actual culprit: Extra Strength Tums. I eat them by the handfuls before bed each night to fend off my nasty heartburn. And as I was shaking them out of the 40 pound Costco jug into my hand the other night, Jon looked over at me and his eyes got all wide and he smacked my hand and the calcium-filled Tums flew across the room, clattering against the wall. And he said, “Dude, it’s those things!” And I hugged him for saving me. And then we turned out the light and went to sleep… well, I couldn’t sleep because of the heartburn. But Jon slept like a baby knowing he had possibly saved me from future kidney ails.
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It seems a little lacking after such a wonderfully spun story to just say: Wow. But that’s how I feel, besides so happy that you & Babe are [generally] okay.
Comment by stephanie (bad mom) — September 23, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
I’m glad that you’re better. It sucks, though, that I moved 500 miles closer to you and I’m still not close enough to help you in an emergancy.
Comment by Sam — September 23, 2008 @ 3:21 pm
Oh, I am so sorry that you went through all that. And I’m sorry that Jon’s boss calls you Suzette. And I’m sorry that I don’t know how to spell Suzanne or Suzann or… so I feel stupid, but I love your blog.
Comment by Jenna — September 23, 2008 @ 4:37 pm
So glad you are feeling better; Stupid Tums!
I had miserable heartburn with both kids, but especially with Zack. Could you try Zantac. It saved me some grief…
Please take care.
ox
Comment by Lisa Milton — September 24, 2008 @ 5:40 am
Oh man, I’m sorry.
Comment by Kerri — September 24, 2008 @ 12:30 pm
What an ordeal. I guess labor will be a piece of cake. Glad you are feeling better!
Comment by Joan — September 25, 2008 @ 12:11 pm
Geez oh man! What an ordeal! I’m glad you’re okay. Stinkin’ kidney stones.
Comment by Leslie — September 29, 2008 @ 11:11 am