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Not A Rolling Stone - 12 September 2003 . 05:12 Monday I woke up with a sharp, stabbing pain in my left side. It hit me suddenly and was quite severe. I stood up and waves of nausea followed. My sister took me to the hospital emergency room and I was told I had a UTI and was given antibiotics. I'm no doctor but I felt I was diagnosed too quickly, that all factors were not taken into consideration. The doctor did give me a dose of percocet which immediately killed the pain, so I was fairly happy. I came home and crashed until the next morning. Tuesday I still have pain but it's a bit duller and there's no nausea so I figure all is becoming well again. I go to work and the pain worsens. One of my coworkers had some pain killers (500 or 800 mg of Motrin) so I took a dose of that. The pill didn't touch my pain. The pain finally reached such severity that I had to leave. By then I was again nauseas and extremely dizzy so a co-worker had to drive me home. I managed to fall alseep and woke up around mid-day Wednesday. By this time I was running a low-grade fever and the pain was completely intolerable. My aunt brought me some anti-nausea medication along with some percocet to put me out of my misery. The rest of the night is a blur... Thursday morning my sister comes home from work and takes me back to the hospital. Luckily I did not have the same doctor as I had Monday. This doctor actually listened to me and did further tests. And thank God he had the foresight to give me pain and anti-nausea medication through an IV. Within about 5 minutes I was so relaxed that I found myself drifting in and out of sleep. I don't remember much about the first half of the day I was there, except that my sister was keeping Mom updated via cell phone and exhaustion finally got the best of her. She had worked the night before and was running on no sleep so once my Grandmother arrived my sister went home. I was taken into radiology to have an IBP, which is a test that checks for kidney stones. They injected me with this contrast dye and told me the entire test should take about 2 hours. Four and a half hours later they still couldn't get the picture they wanted. Why? The contrast was moving so slowly through my left kidney that they thought the kidney had completely shut down. They called a urologist and started talking all kinds of scary things like admitting me and taking me to the O.R. so they could manually extract the stone. It took the urologist about 30 mintues to arrive and he decided to run one last x-ray to see if the contrast dye had moved any further. SUCCESS! The dye finally moved out of the kidney and showed the location of my stone. More good news...the stone is small enough to be passed without surgery. I was given instructions on how to flush out the stone and a prescription for percocet and then I was sent home. I have never been more thrilled to walk through my front door. I know tons of people get kidney stones and tons of people suffer with pain everyday but when things go haywire with my body I tend to freak out. That combined with my low threshhold for pain is not a good equation. I guess what really freaked me out is that the urologist told me if I hadn't come back to the ER for the pain, this stone would have gone undiagnosed. Why? Most doctors don't check for kidney stones even when symptoms are present because stones are not that common. According to the urologist, if my stone were slightly bigger and had gone unnoticed, my blood pressure would have dropped and I would have died. Not could have, WOULD HAVE. Scary shit. Now all I have to do is load up on fluids, take the percocet and take it easy for a while. I have a follow up appointment in two weeks and with any luck this will take care of itself and I won't have to endure an operation. Keep your fingers crossed.
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