Return of the son of…
Greetings from my gurney on the shores of the Bow.
It’s been a minute. Remember last week when my big plan for the blog was to recommend a double-feature of movies every day? Well, about 4 hours after posting that I found my typically sore lower back was worse than usual. I had to replace a wax seal on one of the toilets in my house and after that chore was complete my back hurt even more! I began to grow concerned that I had possibly damaged myself. By 10pm I was in a level of pain I’d never experienced in my life and made the call to go to the emergency room.
The doctor who saw me diagnosed me with a ruptured disc! This was a bummer, she had recently recovered from the exact same injury so she gave me some pain meds, showed me a youtube channel that might help me to do some rehab once the initial pain subsided some and sent me home to convalesce for… probably months.
Cut to: the following day around noon. The pain was back, no medication was touching it and it was even worse than the night before! I was told that if certain things began to occur I should return to the ER and see if maybe things were worse than we thought. So, off I went. This time the doctor I saw was not a recovered back injury patient and almost immediately told me that they had some good news and some bad news. The good news: there was no reason to think I had actually injured my back at all! The bad news: I almost certainly had a kidney stone!
I’d had one kidney stone before, years ago, but it was so small that I didn’t even realize I had it until I passed it. It hurt for a second and then I saw a tiny little 1mm stone and I shrugged and went “huh! weird!”.
One CT scan later confirmed I did indeed have a ~4mm stone. 4mm is on the bigger side of the ones you can usually pass without assistance so I was told I’d probably be sent home but that they were going to send the scan to a Urologist just to be sure. Couple hours later the Urologist informed us that the stone was stuck and I wasn’t going to be able to pass it and I would need emergency surgery.
I was transferred to the hospital where they do this sort of thing (you know what sucks? riding in an ambulance while nauseous due to the hydromorphone you’ve been given for the pain) and got all admitted and cozy. This was actually the nicest part of the whole experience as the stone had decided to sit still for a bit and the pain meds were doing their job AND I got to remove my mask! Plus, the tv in my room had TCM so I got to watch old movies, always a plus.
The following day I got my surgery, the stone was removed (I named him Henry), a ureteral stent was inserted and I was sent home to rest with instructions to remove the stent myself 96 hours later. Sounds like everything is going to be A-OK!
Well, not quite. My body REALLY didn’t like having that stent. Like at all. Like… I was more uncomfortable and in pain than I ever was with the stone. Sleeping was very rare. Painful urination was pretty much constant and I basically started panicking. Nothing I’d read or been told prepared me for how much my body would dislike this stent and as my panic ramped up my recovery slowed down and before you know it… back in the ER.
The ER doc would later send me home with some stronger meds and a lot of reassurement that while what I was experiencing was awful and pretty uncommon it was not unheard-of and my body was healing the way it was supposed to. So home I went and began what basically amounted to a 3-day panic attack.
To cut a long story short the stent came out on sunday and I instantly felt better. I’m far from 100%, (to be honest I’m probably not even 50% of normal capacity) but I’m a hell of a lot better than I was.
I count myself SO lucky that I live in this country where when people are sick we take care of them. There are resources and things available to people who need mental health support. Also, the hugest of huge shoutouts to all the health-care workers out there. Every single person I encountered in my last week at three separate hospitals was absolutely wonderful. So kind. So caring. They took wonderful care of me and one volunteer at one ER even came and held my hand while I was sitting in a wheelchair waiting to be admitted, in agony and terrified. I will never forget that person as long as I live and I wish I could tell them directly how much they meant to me in that moment.
Tomorrow hopefully I can get back to talking about manga or something.
joezone 