I will preface this post by saying that there's going to be some semi-graphic depictions of what I went through here, and for sensitive folks, it's not going to be pleasant. So, be warned, and if you are squeamish about this sort of thing, it may be best that you just skip this one and move on to the next.
We cool? Okay, good.
As most of you were probably able to discern by this point, the localized back pain and blood-tinged urine were caused by -- you guessed it -- a kidney stone.
I have never had kidney stones before; I've only known people who have. My Dad had them when he was younger, a work colleague got them frequently, and my ex developed some so big and painful that she had to have not one, but two surgeries while we were together to get them removed. From everything that I knew and had seen, absolutely nothing about them were pleasurable or an experience that anyone needed to live through or repeat. Kidney stones were one of my biggest health fears, a nightmare scenario that I never, ever wanted to happen to me. Daisy knew this too as I was sure to vocalize it more than once over the course of the past eleven years we've been together.
By the next evening, the back pain had gotten worse and had begun to migrate. I knew at that point it had to be a kidney stone. There was no other real explanation, and this wouldn't have been something else like appendicitis (opposite side of the body) or a simple UTI. Following the pain was intense nausea. I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't sit upright for more than five or ten minutes at a time before I needed to lay down because the room was spinning and I was sweating uncontrollably. It wasn't a feeling or sickness I'd ever had before. I attempted to work my normal shift (starting at 10pm) but only lasted an hour or so before the nausea was so horrific that I began vomiting -- mostly water, as I'd been drinking a lot of water. I could not get comfortable no matter how I sat, stood, laid down, etc. I paced the room in pain before I finally told my boss that I needed to throw in the towel for the night, that I couldn't handle the pain enough to continue working.
As an aside, even writing about all of this now is starting to make me slightly ill and have phantom pain that I know is all in my head.
Anyway.
Daisy figured that it was a kidney stone too and told me that she'd call at 7am to see if I could get in to the doctor for the first available morning appointment, if it was still bothering me at that point when she got up for the day. This was smart thinking, actually; a lot of kidney stones aren't really treatable, per se, if they're small enough to pass through your system sometimes you just have to pass them and deal with it. I could tell mine was moving, and that was a good thing, because if it wasn't moving, that meant that it was stuck and too large to move, and immediate surgery would need to take place. So, if it was the same or worse, we'd go to the doctor, and if it had lessened or otherwise subsided, there wasn't much else to do.
I don't remember a lot of the overnight hours. I remember I talked to a few people from work via text, apologizing for the situation, and I remember trying to sleep in different places in different positions -- first on the couch for a bit, then in the bed with Daisy, then in my chair. I threw up again -- more water, mostly -- and eventually I was able to sleep a bit. For those of you who have never had a kidney stone, it's hard to describe other than the nausea and pain comes in waves. You'll feel relatively normal for an hour or two and then it will slowly build back up again until you're incapacitated for 3-4 hours at a time, and then it'll slowly subside.
When morning rolled around and I was still pretty bad off, Daisy called the doctor and got me set for an appointment for an hour or two later. I can't remember the time, but it mid-morning. She let her job know that she'd be working from home that day so that she could care for me and get me to the doctors when necessary.
In my moments of clarity without nausea or pain (which could last anywhere from 1-3 hours at a time), I reached out to my leadership at work to let them know the situation, and I reached out to HR to get FMLA time set up. I even talked with our HR lady via phone to give as many details as possible because, at that moment, I did not know if I would need surgery or would be out for a day or two or a week or two. Everything was up in the air, and I was frightened, sleep-deprived, and not in a good place mentally or physically. She worked to get the FMLA stuff set up in the background as a safety net, primarily because I only had two days' worth of PTO left after Covid that I needed to save (for reasons I'll get to in a post here further down the road) and as I'm salaried, not hourly, I get paid regardless of whether I'm there or not. FMLA basically saves me from being punished for being sick and keeps me on the payroll, and if I'd need to be out for any real length of time it would absolutely be necessary, as would the short-term disability benefits I pay for out of every single paycheck.
But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'd been drinking as much water as possible, but it likely still wasn't enough. My nausea was really hindering that, by a lot -- meaning, I didn't know how much water or other liquids (or food, even) I'd be able to keep down longer than an hour or two in the event that my stomach decided "nope, it's time for you to throw up again." This will be important to the story later. My urine had been alternating between a tinge of blood here and there to shockingly, amazingly clear or very pale yellow at best. I figured that as long as I was still peeing a normal amount and at normal intervals, the less blood the better because it meant that water, and following logic, the kidney stone, was still moving through my system and wasn't "hung up" anywhere. Lube the pipes, etc.
By the time I went to the doctor I was in one of my "few hours of clarity" times, thankfully. We still took the puke bucket (really, a big popcorn bowl) in the car with us, as I predicted -- and was correct in that prediction -- that even the movement of the car would make me pretty nauseous.
I had not peed in some time before we went to the doctor -- maybe an hour or two -- and when I was asked for a urine sample, I told the doctor and attending nurse "well, I hope it shows something for you, because I've been peeing pretty normally with no discoloration for awhile now."
Oh. Oh no. Oh no no no.
When I let loose into the toilet I already knew something was wrong. I began to fill the urine specimen cup. It was red. And I'm not talking normal red, or a tinge of red or pink, I'm talking Hawaiian Punch red.
Few things will horrify a person more than watching yourself pee what could have been literal straight blood. I mean, it wasn't straight blood, but good lord did it really look close. There was no pain. There was no discomfort. It felt like a normal pee -- but it sure did not look like it. It looked like a murder scene.
If I, or the doctors, had any doubt in my mind before that it was indeed a kidney stone, that doubt had been erased by the time that sample was given.
I talked with the doctor for a bit; he was an older guy who had been practicing rural medicine for about 30 years before moving to Omaha; he was not my normal physician. He asked me the standard run of questions ("Are you in pain now? Does it hurt when I push down here? Do you want an injection to stop the pain?" etc) and honestly, at the time, I felt pretty normal. I was tired, I was scared that it would be a stone so large they'd have to operate, and I knew that no matter how I felt now, it would be fleeting as the next wave of pain and nausea would be coming sooner rather than later. I described my symptoms and how it came in waves, and he offered to prescribe me some dissolve-in-your-mouth nausea pills, which I gladly accepted. They were $4 and I picked them up at the in-house pharmacy on the way out.
"So in these situations," the doctor said, "we want to get you a CT scan done to see how big the stone is, if it's just the one or if there's more, and where it is. It's obviously moving, and that's good. It'll feel like hell, but that's good, it means that it's not too big to get hung up in your urinary tract, hopefully."
I was sort of numb by a lot of this talk at this point. "How big is too big?" I asked.
"Over/under for size is 6mm," the doctor said. "Anything over 6mm they'll likely want to do surgery on, whether they do it sonically or manually. Anything under that will generally pass throughout your system without medical intervention."
6mm, for the record -- and the doctor did not tell me this, I found it out later -- is the size of a pencil eraser. When I read that, I screamed internally.
I was also asked if I drank a lot of diet soda.
Now, as a diabetic, that's the only soda I can really drink. I have a normal, full-sugar soda maybe once or twice a year. And, for the past six months or so, I've been trying to wean myself off sodas and caffeine almost completely. I switched to a much lower-caffeine sparkling water version of an energy drink to get me off Monsters and Rockstars (and I always drank the sugar-free ones there anyway) and most of the time, I have 1-2 cups of coffee per night while I'm working -- that I sometimes don't even finish. The rest of my fluid intake is water or sparkling water, either lightly flavored or plain, but still with no sugar.
But I do drink 1-3 cans of diet soda per week, usually Diet Coke or Diet Mtn Dew. I used to drink far more than that before I began my conscious effort to start weaning myself off caffeine as much as possible.
"I do drink some diet soda," I said, "but nowhere near the amount I used to."
"Well," the doctor said, "for some reason -- and we don't really know why -- people who drink a lot of diet sodas tend to get more kidney stones. It's not necessarily the case for regular soda, though it can be. We just see it a lot more in diet soda drinkers."
Is it -- perhaps -- because diabetics tend to be prone to kidney stones, and diet sodas are the only sodas they can drink? Who knows. I didn't really ask questions as I wasn't honestly in the right frame of mind to do so.
They gave me a referral to urology (which I would need if I'd had to go under the actual or sonic knife to get the stone taken care of) and the number for the extension office -- for lack of a better term -- that I'd need to go to in order to get the CT scan done. They'd already sent the referral information over, but we still had to call and make the appointment for the actual scan.
Daisy called while we were in the car, and the soonest time we could get in for the CT was for the afternoon hours -- 1, 2, something like that. I was pretty out of it and don't remember the exact timeframe (again, I'm writing about this well over a month later). This was several hours in the future and we had to come home first, mainly because Daisy needed to do some actual work from home and I needed to prep for my next wave of nausea and pain. As soon as we arrived home, I popped one of the dissolve-in-your-mouth nausea pills and drank a good bit of water...which I promptly vomited up an hour or so later because that train's never late, and I had the aforementioned conversations above with my leadership and HR.
Throughout the entire ordeal, as mentioned, I'd been trying to stay hydrated and had been continually been taking ibuprofen for the pain, which -- when it hit -- had been pretty nasty. In addition to the nausea, which was considerable, the pain when the stone was moving was a radiating, excruciating ache that felt like a million tiny knives being twisted through my abdomen and back. It wasn't a sharp, stabbing pain but a persistent, moving one that there was really no relief from. There was no position I could move my body into to lessen it; sitting, standing, walking, laying down -- it all hurt the same. It was the type of pain and discomfort that could drive a person mad even without it being excruciating.
I don't remember a lot of the time between the doctor's appointment and the CT scan. As mentioned, I knew I threw up again, I know I spoke to my people at work, but I don't remember if I ate anything, watched TV, took a nap, or what. I just remember being in a bad place. Daisy would later tell me that I had apparently been incessantly annoying (which, really, is her right to say, she was my caretaker during this time, and I'm sure I was a bear to deal with -- not really through any fault of my own).
The CT scan was to be done at a private-practice sort of office with an imaging suite about ten minutes from the house. I've not had a CT scan done for any reason since I was a very young child; even x-rays for anything for me were rare and I've only had a handful of them done over the years, primarily at the dentist. I'm not claustrophobic or anything, so the MRI tube machine thing doesn't fill me with dread like it does some other people. I was feeling okay, not great, but okay by the time we went to get the scan done.
The scan itself took less than five minutes. I had to empty my pockets, take off my shoes/ring/watch, and I laid on a flat table that slid me into the machine. I was relaxed, they took their pictures, and then I got back up and went back out to the waiting area for whatever results would come in.
Apparently, the way the process works is that the scans are taken, they're sent to the doctor's office, the doctor reviews them and sends back the diagnosis to the office staff there (so they have something to do, I guess? The office was dead quiet, in the basement of a larger complex, and aside from me and Daisy there was one other person there to get scanned).
We sat there for what was easily a half hour. We couldn't really talk without everyone in that part of the building hearing us, and we were also underground in a basement-office-like area, so we had zero cell signal. Do you know how terrifying it is to have to sit in a quiet underground room awaiting results that will tell you whether or not you have to get a major surgery, without any outlet to express that terror and anxiety?
Finally I was called up to the desk.
"Your results are in," the lady said. "It is a two-millimeter stone, and it is just the one. It is moving through your ureter now and doesn't appear to be hung up, but you should be able to pass it normally once it moves into the bladder."
I sighed a giant sigh of relief. Remember that 6mm was the pencil-eraser-sized stone and it was the kind that they'd have to remove with surgery or break up with lithotripsy. A 2mm stone was a third the size of that...which apparently still sucks but wasn't gonna get stuck in there anywhere. The results were sent to my doctor and I was sent on my way home to rest.
There are two things that they don't tell you about kidney stones, and maybe they should:
1. Maybe some folks won't, but I got very constipated during the process, despite how much water I was drinking. I don't know why, honestly. I know that this constipation contributed at least somewhat to my back pain during the entire ordeal.
2. It can take a week or two to actually pass the stone; even once it's in the bladder it can rattle around in there for a while.
I'm not going to elaborate on the former, as I would like to keep some of my dignity intact, but I will expand a bit upon the latter.
Over the course of the next day or three, I slowly began to feel normal again. Like, I wasn't feeling great, I wasn't feeling fantastic, but I was slowly getting back to normal. I was told that since this was a small stone, it would likely pass without any significant pain or discomfort and when it did, I may not even feel it. I took that as a good sign and very slowly returned to my normal life and activities. I went back to work, where I was told I didn't need to provide a doctor's note or anything for my leave (I had gotten one, of course, just in case) and I mostly felt okay by the end of the week. I peed out what I would only assume were small blood clots from my urinary tract; some were red and looked like little clots and some were thin and black and looked like singular coffee grounds. Some of them were big enough to where I assumed they were the stone (or pieces of it) and, as I was feeling pretty normal and finally sleeping (and pooping) again on a regular basis, I figured that was the end of it. I kept up my water intake and Daisy got me "royal chanca piedra" botanical supplement vitamins that were supposed to help break up stones and loosen up your urinary tract so that you not only peed more, but you could pee more easily -- I guess. I took one or two of them every day with my normal medications and didn't really notice much of a difference in much of anything, but okay, sure, we'll try it, whatever at this point, right?
I can sense some of you starting to pull away. Stick with me here, it's about to get worse.
So, over the course of the next few days -- and I'm talking now a full week, week-and-a-half after I started actually feeling better, had stopped puking, had continued work and life as per the usual -- I noticed a painful, burning sensation when I peed. It wasn't every time, but it was most times, and generally I didn't feel it in, ahem, full stream, but as it wound down and finished it would just ache me in the, well, interior of my penis. I'm not trying to be edgy or graphic in saying that or anything, just stating a general fact. It would go away after about 5-10 minutes after I peed and I didn't think much of it -- obviously the clots had to be coming from somewhere, and I was sure that the stone had probably irritated the fuck out of my entire urinary tract.
But this was different, this wasn't in the actual urinary tract -- the pain and discomfort was from within my dork. It didn't feel like anything was, ahem, stuck in there as nothing felt blocked or otherwise hurt at any other time, just when I peed. I chalked it up to maybe some sort of mild UTI caused by the stone ripping me up here and there, and went about my life.
About three days later, as I was peeing before work one night (still somewhat uncomfortably), I felt something move and an object came out of me and ricocheted against the toilet bowl before sinking to the bottom. It did not hurt, but I absolutely felt it shoot out like a bullet.
It was the stone.
And before you ask, yes, you bet your ass I fished it out.
Feel free to enlarge that if you want. That is my index finger next to it, for scale purposes. That tiny little jagged calcium rock is what put me through multiple days of discomfort, general agony, vomiting, nausea and dizziness, and cost me three days of work and $300 for a CT scan.
In case anyone ever argues how humans are strong and resilient and have a high tolerance for pain or some shit.
I left that stone on that folded piece of toilet paper on the bathroom sink. When Daisy asked why, I told her that it was there so every time I went into the bathroom I could give it the middle finger.
Eventually, of course, I did get rid of it.
Almost immediately after the stone passed, the burning/painful urination went away and I was 100% back to health. The doctors called me a few days later and asked if I'd used the referral to urology or if they could cancel it for the time being, and I told them it was fine, they could cancel it, I passed the stone and was fully back to normal.
Since then, well over a month (almost two, now) later, I have been drinking at least 64oz of water a day in addition to any other liquids I consume, and I have changed around my diet quite a bit to help lessen any further occurrences of stones -- as well as to help my general well-being and health when it comes to my diabetes and cholesterol levels. It is working -- I had my follow-up appointment for bloodwork on this past Friday, and my cholesterol is back to completely normal ranges, my triglycerides are down almost 200 points, my A1C has dropped from 8.2 back to 7.5 (the lowest it's been in a year), and I would expect it all will continue to lower as long as I remain on a fairly restrictive diet and continue to be physically active as much as I can.
Based on what's coming up for me in the next two months or so, I don't really expect any of this to be a major issue, honestly...unless another kidney stone pops up.
More to come.
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