In the evening of 5/28/2007, Memorial Day, Elaine rushed me to the emergency room. That morning I started to feel an intense pain in my lower abdomen. I had this type of pain before – decades ago – but on my left side. At that time, soaking in a hot tub of water made it go away. Not this time. The pain came and went in slow waves. On a scale from 0 – 10, it hung around as a 3 with crescendos going to 8. I tried drinking water to hydrate, but couldn’t keep it down. I felt bloated and nauseous.
I finally realized I was not going to solve this on my own. It took at least 30 minutes to get to the hospital. Being a U. S. national holiday, the emergency room was full. I walked in doubled-over. I found a couch and headed right for it. Elaine started the process to get me checked in. I writhed on the couch for at least 15 minutes before they could get me into a wheel chair, then onto a portable hospital bed that was set up in the hallway due to the over crowding of patients.
I was given a morphine drip while waiting to be seen by a doctor. It wasn’t helping. 30 minutes later they switched to another pain killer and THAT worked! Eventually I was put into a wheelchair and taken to a hospital room. They put me into the hospital’s heart wing because all the regular rooms were full. It was a very nice room. Made for two patients, but the other bed was never filled the entire time I was there.
They couldn’t do x-rays and CT scan until the next morning. The pain continued throughout the night. I called the nurse each time the medication wore off.
The next morning they ran tests. Medically speaking, I had “right ureteral calculus”. Kidney stones. One of them tried to get out and got stuck in the kidney’s exit tube. The diagnosis: “There is suggestion of a 3mm calcification projecting over the right transverse process of L3 which may represent the right proximal ureteral calculus. A small calcification in the left hemipelvis is visualized likely represent a phlebolith (calcification within a vein). …” They also discovered that my other kidney, the left one, was not working properly. “There is marked atrophy of the left kidney”. I had no idea. After some thought, I bet the pain in my left side from decades ago was also related to kidney stones and may have been the cause of the atrophy. I go and get the exit route of my right kidney plugged up with a stone and suddenly there is no way for fluid waste water to get out of my body. I was poisoning myself slowly with a buildup of creatinine.
Time for the operation. I was ‘put to sleep’. The doctor worked his extraction tool through my urethra (that is correct, gentlemen, he went through THAT way) into my right kidney. He tried to grab the stone to pull it out, but instead pushed it further in. Here are the doctor’s notes:
“After informed and signed consent was obtained, the patient was brought to the operating room and placed on the table in supine position. He was placed under general anesthesia, prepped and draped in a sterile manner. I could not advance the scope all the way into the kidney. As a result, I removed the ureteroscope and then back loaded the guide wire on to the cystoscope. I put a Cook stent over the guide wire. The proximal limb curled in the kidney and the distal limb curled in the bladder …”
He made a decision to put in a stent (a tubular support placed temporarily inside a blood vessel, canal, or duct to aid healing or relieve an obstruction) that would stay in my body for a week until lithotripsy procedure could be scheduled. Lithotripsy: Extracorporeal shock wave – technique for treating stones in the kidney and ureter that does not require surgery. Instead, high energy shock waves are passed through the body and used to break stones into pieces as small as grains of sand.
I was in the hospital room overnight and went home the next day. The side-effect of having the stent put in was blood in the urine. I tried to do my regular chores. An activity such as mowing the lawn caused the stent to rub against my ‘insides’ and induce bleeding. Urinating was painful.
A week later I went back to have the stent taken out and have the lithotripsy procedure done. Then it was a waiting game for the little pieces of kidney stone to pass naturally. I was supposed to keep the remnants in a jar and return them to the hospital for evaluation. I had to pee through a strainer. As each piece passed through, it was like trying to pee out a shard of glass. Over a few weeks, everything went back to normal.
Eleven years has gone by. I often wonder if the left kidney has any function, at all. If not, the right one will have to work with me to stay longer on this crazy ride.
X-Rays – Click an image to open lightbox viewer
