2009-09-13 - 4:02 a.m.
PAIN & SUFFERING
So when we last left off, I had stayed up most of the night to observe my then six-month old daughter Madison, who'd come down with a little bit of a cough. It was about 4:00 am when Charity awoke and took over, allowing me to go get some sleep.
Given that Madison and her sister Melody will be turning one year old tomorrow, if you want to go back to that previous post and refresh your memory on the details, I'll understand.
Are you back? OK.
So after everything that you just got caught up on, I went to bed. But before I got in bed, I had to pee. You're probably thinking "Why, Jake, that's a little too much information to be sharing". But, oh, we're just getting started, friends and neighbors.
I had to pee so... I peed. The process was perfectly normal as far as peeing goes. But about 5-10 minutes later, after I got into bed, I started to notice this odd burning feeling in my, you know, my peeing organ down there. It only lasted about 30 seconds or so, but still, it was odd. It hadn't burned when I'd actually peed, yet several minutes later I had this weird burning feeling. Quite strange.
I didn't think a lot of it, though. I made a mental note to ask Charity if she might have given me the clap, and then I rolled over and tried to get to sleep.
Sadly, however, it was not to be. A few minutes after the burning sensation faded, a new feeling emerged. It came on softly but quickly intensified and I suddenly had this feeling like I'd badly pulled a muscle on the left side of my lower back. I mean, really pulled it. Wrenched it. Tore it right off the bone. It hurt like a mother is what I'm saying.
As you may or may not know, I am no stranger to back pain, having dealt with problems with the discs in my spine several years ago. That whole incident certainly sucked, but as a result of it I have become a bit of a connoisseur of lumbar-area discomfort. I knew immediately that the pain was different than the pain caused by the discs. I also know from experience that if you get your spine out of whack, it can cause issues with the surrounding muscles. Which, in my case, meant contracting as tightly as they could and being a non-stop source of pain.
That's what I thought was happening when this new pain set in, except it was in a completely different place than I was used to. I started rolling around in bed, trying to alleviate it, and I got into these positions that are supposed to help relax your back muscles. I learned those back when I had the disc problems. But none of it helped.
I eventually sat up and then stood up and started walking and stretching and doing everything I could to make the pain go away. Still, though, nothing helped. Then I ended up going back to the bathroom because I started feeling like I was going to throw up. That's how bad it hurt, that puking started to seem possible.
Overall, I'd say I paced around for about a half-hour. Which in hindsight is kind of impressive to deal with the pain for that long, I think. I'm no nancy-boy over here. Eventually, though, the puke-like feeling became reality and I hurled. And then I did it again. Then again. And then I did it 3-4 times right in a row. If someone had been timing those last ones, I think I might have set some kind of record for the most pukes in a 2-second span.
At this point, two sobering thoughts became clear: first, there was clearly something wrong. And, worse yet, I was going to have to tell Charity that something was wrong.
I want to be clear about this, so allow me to elaborate. If you remember posts from the past about having a mouse in the house and such things, Charity doesn't always react well to bad news. But that's a different type of thing altogether. In a situation like this... I don't want to say a crisis, but where there's something wrong with someone, she's amazing.
Just that very weekend with Madison and her cough, she was very calm and sure of what she was doing and overall she handled it so much better than me. There have been a handful of situations in the almost twenty-five years I've known her where I've been wildly impressed with her in situations like that.
The thing is, though, when the person who has something wrong with them is me, she kinda goes to pieces. Not that bad things happen to me often, but there have been enough incidents that I've learned I'm kinda exception to the rule. I like to think it's a combo of her caring so much about me and her viewing me as completely invincible and impervious to pain.
So when something happens that threatens both those ideals, she has trouble handling it. Which is flattering, I guess, but that won't help me when I fall over dead some day while she stands there stammering and trying to figure out what to do. I'm only kidding. Sort of.
Anyway, back to the story at hand. I made my way downstairs and, through the blinding crippling pain I was in, managed to tell Charity that something was wrong. She handled it better than I thought, which was especially impressive because we were still dealing with Maddy's whole cough thing. We're talking double-whammy over here.
She ended up calling her mom, who told me later that the phone call at 4:30 am freaked her out because she thought Madison had taken a turn for the worse or something like that. Thankfully, it was just me who was suffering. Charity described to her what was wrong with me, and right away her mom said it sounded like I had kidney stones. PROGNOSIS: NEGATIVE.
For reasons I will soon explain, I really really did not want it to be kidney stones. I think I would have preferred cancer.
I was in a lot of pain so her mom said we should go to the emergency room and they'd load me up with painkillers and probably do a cat-scan to check my kidneys and find out what was wrong. The crappy part is the hospital is like a half-hour from our house, but that's one of the drawbacks to living well outside any city limits with nobody around us. Charity's mom isn't actually a practicing doctor anymore, she's now administrative at the hospital, so she said she'd call ahead and make sure they knew we were coming and all that stuff.
But we still sorta had a problem, because... I don't remember if I've mentioned this... but Charity and I have two babies now. And we can't be gallivanting off and having fun at emergency rooms with our girls at home. So we first had to drive the girls into town to Charity's mom's house so she could take them, and then we had to go to the hospital.
Also, I'm not sure if I've mentioned this either, but Charity doesn't like driving at night. Or in the dark, I should say, since 4:30 in the morning really isn't "night".
But anyway, there we were, driving down the road -- me in fairly severe pain, not knowing if I'd start throwing up again. Charity, frazzled not only because something was wrong with me but because she was driving in the dark, sitting behind the wheel. And our two precious girls freshly woken up, plucked from their cribs and thrown into their car-seats, surely feeling a tad bit annoyed by this inconvenience. Although if they were, they kept it to themselves.
We made it to Charity's mom's house and she came right out to the driveway and took the girls. She also checked on me and, if memory serves, took my pulse, which slightly raised my level of concern. She repeated that they should be waiting for us at the ER, the ER at her hospital where she works and is an authority figure, so off we went.
I've mentioned twice now that Charity's mom called ahead for us, so surely you've already figured out that when we arrived and walked into the ER, there wasn't a single soul in sight. Oh, was her mom mad when she found out. I don't think I've ever seen Charity's mom mad before. She's Sicilian so it's kinda frightening.
Anyway, we had to ring this bell and wait 2-3 minutes before someone came up to the front area. Which isn't really that bad, but when you know someone has called ahead to make sure there are people waiting, it's a little annoying. But he true annoyance came next as this nurse sat me down, asked for my insurance card, started asking me my name, my address, and all this other stuff that 1) was right on the card I gave her, 2) my wife could have easily told her as other medical professionals came and assisted in alleviating my pain.
What happens when someone with a serious injury comes in? Do they make them sit and answer questions before sewing their arm back on?
Anyway, for some reason -- perhaps because I was in pain and wasn't enunciating my words as clearly as I normally would -- there was some detail (I think my social security number) that the nurse kept getting wrong. And after 2-3 times, I'm like "NO, it's 42EIGHT3", trying to be polite as I corrected her but wanting to hurry the process along. I made those numbers up, BTW, so don't think you're gonna be stealing my identity.
And the nurse kind of tittered and laughed about the misunderstanding, as thought we were just sitting back, sipping lemonade, having a relaxing conversation. It's like, um, hello? I'm in serious pain here. If you can get on that today, I'd appreciate it.
Finally, about 15-20 minutes after I arrived, the nurse starts leading me to a room, but then stops and pulls a plastic cup out of her coat and directs me to a bathroom telling me that the doctor will want a urine sample. This is problematic because, as you may recall, I had just peed right before this whole pain thing started.
I told her that and said I didn't need to go, but she insisted and practically forced me into the bathroom. I waited about 10 seconds and then came back out like "Nope, sorry, still can't go". She seemed perturbed but led me to a room anyway.
It was in this hospital room where a different nurse, a time-tested veteran, and like two young college intern nurses took over. I got in bed and the veteran nurse told the intern nurses to start an IV so they could get some painkillers in me. I was like "YES". Tragically, however, our medicinal educational system must be in shambles, because these two girls seemed to have no idea how to actually put an IV in someone. So after 5 minutes of them screwing around, the veteran nurse did it herself.
Based on my symptoms, the nurse who'd taken my info and the veteran nurse both seemed fairly certain that I was dealing with kidney stones. In fact, the nurse who took my info seemed to relax when she made that diagnosis, as if the problem was solved and there was no need for her to be in a rush.
Charity's mom was upset that the person who should have been up front wasn't there, but if she was going to discipline and/or fire anyone, I wanted it to be that nurse who took my info. (For the record, I don't think anyone was fired. Or even disciplined.)
So the veteran nurse started talking about kidney stones and how people say they're more painful than childbirth. And that brings us right to the reason why I was hoping for pretty much anything but kidney stones. You see, for quite some time, I have been under the impression that the pain involved with kidney stones comes when you have to pee out this sharp jagged rock-like substance. Meaning that it, in my case, it would travel through my wiener, cutting and tearing things up as it goes, and then it would rip my peehole apart as it exits.
That might sound like fun to some of you, but not to me. I suppose the main reason I was under that impression was an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer has a kidney stone and has to pee it out while he's at the circus. He goes into the bathroom and emits this ear-splitting yell that freaks out all the animals and causes a tightrope walker to fall. From that, I obviously assumed that peeing out a kidney stone was a horrible experience.
However, while talking with both the veteran nurse and the ER doctor who came into examine me, I was told the severe pain associated with kidney stones is actually when the stone moves through your kidney. Hence me having intense pain in my lower back. The doctor totally dismissed the notion of it hurting when you pee it out, and when I told him why I thought that’s what happened, he said I shouldn't believe everything I see on TV.
HOWEVER. In the months since then, I have learned that if the stone is large enough, it can, in fact, be painful when you pee it out. The amount of contradictory information I've gotten over these past few months about kidney stones is really quite alarming. I'm talking about information from doctors, not from some Joe off the street.
The ER doc tells me it doesn't hurt when you pee it out, another doctor says it can. One doctor says stones take a long time to form, another says they can form quickly. One doctor says if you have calcium stones you need to watch your calcium intake, another says if you have calcium stones it's probably due to a LACK of calcium (thus raising the % of the other element that causes calcium stones to form). What the hell is going on? It boggles the mind.
Anyway, the first painkiller they gave me with the IV didn't really help a whole lot, so they put in some morphine and after several minutes I was feeling a lot better. They pushed my bed across the whole hospital, or so it seemed, to get me to the cat-scan area. They took a cat-scan and then wheeled me back to my room.
Now it was just a matter of waiting for the cat-scan to come back and waiting for me to pee, because they still wanted that to happen. I was even getting fluids in my IV to help that along. After a while the doctor came in and said my cat-scan was totally clear, meaning there were no stones in my kidneys, and whatever had caused the pain had probably moved to my bladder already. All that was left was to pee it out.
BTW, this is where he laughed off the notion of pain when you pee it out, and boy was he lucky I didn't have some massive hurts-when-you-pee stone. Because I would have come back looking for him.
So everything was good but they still wanted a urine sample for some reason. I liked the veteran nurse very much, but at one point she said something about sticking a catheter in me and taking pee out of my bladder, which... yeah right. That wasn't happening. And peeing on command is so much easier when there's pressure, so thanks for piling it on by putting that fear in me.
Charity had been in the room with me the whole time, of course, and she'd been telling the nurse the whole story of how our daughter had this cough and I'd been up all night and hadn't slept. So the nurse finally said "You know what, why don't you get some sleep, and I'll wake you up in an hour or so and maybe when you wake up you'll have to pee". I was like "Great! Zzzzzzzzzz..."
As promised, about an hour later they woke me up. I didn't pee right then but I peed shortly thereafter. And after that we were finally free to go, along with our parting gifts: a sterile plastic pee cup to store the stone after it came out, and a white strainer type thing that I was to pee in until the stone came out.
We went back to Charity's mom's house, where suddenly I felt the need to pee again. And right into that strainer came this little kidney stone, no bigger than a grain of sand. Maybe a slightly larger than average grain of sand.
I think the next day I took the stone to my urologist (I have a urologist now), who I got set up with upon checking out of the ER. And a week or so later I got a letter with an analysis of the stone back that said I have the kind of stones that the body produces, usually if the pH of your pee (your peeH) is a little off from normal.
There's these pills I can take to normalize everything, but foolishly I didn't actually start taking them until July, when I had another stone situation, although not as severe as the first. It wasn't that I didn't take the pills, I didn't even have a prescription for them. But now I do and I'm taking them and hopefully everything is ship-shape vis a vie my peeH and my kidneys and all that.
That is the end of my tale. I shall return soon with all kinds of exciting stories that are more current and less painful!
