Personal Trauma: Kidney Stones

Before my eyes even opened that foggy fall Saturday morning, I had the feeling something was wrong.

By the time I had finished my morning routine and sat down to my bowl of Kashi cereal and soy milk, I knew exactly what was wrong.

I had a kidney stone.

Looking back, I have no idea how I was that perceptive to self-diagnose.

Sure, I’ll be the first to admit I’m kind of an anatomy nerd, but I’m no doctor.

However it was that I knew that what had started out as a slights muscle twinge in my lower back would soon explode into blindingly mind-numbing pain, I knew I had to do something about it, but only after I finished breakfast.

I think it’s worth mentioning that I’m no pansy when it comes to physical pain; I have a pretty high threshold, sometimes bordering on masochism.

But this pain? This pain far and above exceeded anything I had ever felt or have felt since.

It didn’t take long before that annoying pain in my back became so great that I could barely stand, let alone handle the coinciding nausea that had me stumbling down the hall and into the bathroom every half hour.

Why I waited so long to ask one of my 11 housemates to drive me to the emergency room, I’ll never know.

Probably, it was due to the fact that I hate asking anyone for anything because I can “do it all by myself” and I “don’t want to be a burden to anyone else.”

Though I had at one point considered driving myself to the nearby St. Vincent’s ER, I eventually got over myself, or maybe it’s more correct to say my pain overwhelmed my pride (plus the prodding of my insistent mother).

With tears streaming down my face, I tried to keep myself composed as I knocked on door after door in my eight-bedroom house.

Finally, two of my housemates agreed to drive me to the ER.

I grabbed a plastic bag on the way out the door in case I decided to lose it again and weakly climbed up into my friend’s Jeep.

For what little strength I had left, I might as well have had to climb Mt. Everest.

After what seemed like the world’s longest car ride, the three of us arrived at St. Vincent’s, and I managed to drag myself out of the car and hobble through the lobby and down the halls of the hospital towards urgent care.

It must have been the contorted twisting of pain across my face that tipped off one of the ER nurses to my condition, because as soon as she saw me, she ran to go get me a wheelchair.

Despite how much I wanted to decline the offer (again, I didn’t need anyone’s help with anything), I was too weak to refuse.

The other of the nurses handed me a clipboard, expecting me to fill in the myriad of blank spaces on the front and back of the intake form: name (first and last), DOB, gender, current medications.

Really?! I could barely keep my eyes open and my hand from shaking from the excruciating pain, and they expected me to write these things “clearly and legibly”?

The next few hours are a hazy blur of doctors, nurses, x-rays and pain killers.

Recalling the events is a Herculean task, and what little my brain does let me remember comes in flashes.

I remember being wheeled into urgent care, dry heaving in the bathroom before being taken to my bed.

I remember getting a swift shot of demerol to the hip and the blessed release if brought from the constant pain.

Then, I slept. It seemed like hours, but it couldn’t have been because before I knew it, I was being carted through the hospital on my bed, down the elevator and into radiology.

The technician was nice enough, I recall, but at that point, exhaustion had gripped my body and all I wanted to do was sleep.

They took several images of my lower abdomen, but not before the perfunctory, “Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

“Not unless I’m the Virgin Mary,” was my standard retort.

After being wheeled back up to urgent care, Krissy and Kristin, my two housemates, came in to see me.

I’m sure I was quite the sight to see: hair messy and matted around my forehead, cheeks and eyes tinted red from crying, and my always-stylish unisex hospital gown.

Of course I knew they didn’t care, they only wanted to make sure I was okay.

And even though every fiber of my being cried out to surrender to sleep, I felt the simultaneous compulsion to play host to my friends in my own little curtained-off corner of the ER.

When the doctor eventually came back with the results, he told me I had a kidney stone.

Wow! What a shocker.

Well actually the real shocker came when I went home to San Diego the next weekend after not passing it and finding out that I had not one but two stones.

So the ordeal I thought had ended when I signed my discharge papers at St. Vincent’s had really only just begun.

My urologist (yes, 19 years old and already with a urologist) scheduled a procedure to remove one (the other one was too near my hip bone to be removed without bone damage).

The procedure left me with one remaining stone, a stint in my kidney and a prescription for a wonderful little drug called Darvocet.

However Hollywood may try to glamorize pain killer addiction, there was nothing like that about this drug.

The side effects were so severe that I was left to choose between the pain of a dislodging kidney stone or the debilitating nausea and hallucinations of the drugs.

Most times I waited so long to take them that I got to enjoy both concurrently.

A week passed, and I was still in pain and as if on schedule, that Saturday morning, two weeks after the start of this ordeal, I was gripped with the same pain as I had at the outset.

Not even the drugs eased the pain.

This time, my dad drove up from San Diego to take me back home.

On the ride there, overcome with nausea from the pain in my kidney and the side effects of the drugs, I frantically asked my dad to pull over.

He immediately reached into the back seat of the car, dumped the contents of his lunch sack on the seat and handed the brown paper bag to me.

I threw up into the bag, and we pulled off the 405 and left it on the freeway overpass.

Not my finest moment to be sure, but it’s this little anecdote that prevents me from looking back at the situation with complete horror.

My second weekend in San Diego went much like the first, with the notable exception of my half-conscious screaming at the ER nurse to “Give me the f***ing drugs.”

I have no recollection of this event, but my mother swears it happened, and since I was blacked out, who am I to say?

It gives us something to look back at and laugh.

I’m pretty sure without that laughter, my family and I would have gone insane from the stress of it all.