Yep, I Had a Kidney Stone

During the fall of my junior year, I woke up Thursday morning around 6:30 a.m. with a really bad side ache.  It was no ordinary side ache.  I got up to pee just to see if it would go away, it didn’t.  I lay back down in bed curled up to see if it would go away, it didn’t.  I continued to lay there until about seven.  I heard Megan get up because she gets up every morning early to take a shower and go into the training room.  At that time, Lauren was living with us on the couch.  I walked out there in excruciating pain in sweatpants, clinching my phone and my wallet.  Lauren looks at me frantically, “Val, you ok?”  I went and laid in front of the door curled up in a ball.  Lauren gets up asks me if she should call the hospital.  I tell her to see when they open and Megan can take us.  Megan comes out of the shower in a towel wondering why Lauren is freaking out and why I am up at 7 a.m. and lying in front of the door.  I couldn’t stand, sit or lay without it hurting so badly.  Lying, curled up was the only thing I could do.  “Megan, take me to the hospital…please…”  She agreed and ran into her bedroom and threw some clothes on.  She went outside got the car and I slowly walked down the stairs and curled up into the back seat of the Echo.
 
The ride to “student death” (student health/hospital) took soooo long for some reason, longer than usual.  I walked slowly up to the admission desk and gave the nurse my information.  They set me up with a room, I got a robe on and they started doing tests.  “Make it stop hurting!”  I said that over and over until I had a lot of morphine in me.  Lauren and Megan were in there with me.  I had Megan call my mom on my cell phone.  Megan was very vague when she was giving information to my mom.  My mom told Megan that she would come to Pullman as soon as she got off work.  At that point, we really couldn’t give my mom any information about my status because we did not know.  I remember puking on the floor because the pain was so bad.  I have never had pain that horrible before.  I even yelled out to people that I just wanted to die than live with the pain.  They took x-rays, a MRI and the other general tests that they do on patients.  They put me in a room and they hooked me up to more machines, then they started asking me questions.  Lauren and Megan decided to stay with me for a while.  They left around lunch time but Megan was the only one to come back and stay with me until my mom showed up around 11:00 that night.  Megan missed an exam to stay with me in the hospital.  She got it cleared with her professor.  I had her talk to my professors because I had a test the next day I was not going to make it to.  She got everything taken care of.  I slept most of the afternoon because I was not in pain anymore because of all the morphine that was pumped into me.  Megan is definitely a true friend

The doctor that was assigned to me came in with my x-ray and she showed me why I was in so much pain earlier that morning.  I had a kidney stone stuck in the tube between my kidney and my bladder.  The reason why it hurt so much was that the stone has little miniature barbs on the outside of it, so it scraping down every couple of minutes through my fleshy insides was indeed painful.  They told me the stone was not big enough for a surgery, it would have to come out on its own when I peed.  I slept most of the afternoon until the nurses came in to check my vitals.  Megan spent most of the day at my side until she left to go run some errands.  When she got back she brought me back a stuffed duck filled with those Styrofoam bead things.  My mom showed up to the hospital around 11 p.m. that night.  She told me about her drive.  She said it was the fastest drive over to Pullman she has ever driven.  This was due to no traffic and she was in a hurry to see how I was doing.  Once mom was there everything was okay.  The doctor explained it all to her as she got ready for bed.  The nurse said it would be okay for her to spend the night with me in one of the patient beds.  One of the other nurses wanted to know if I wanted any food or anti-nausea medicine to make my stomach feel better.  I told her I was not hungry and that I should try the anti-nausea medicine to make my stomach feel better.  Bad idea.  The anti-nausea medicine made me puke more than I had in years.  Every time I got up to pee (because of the IV), I came back and puked before I got into my bed.  It hurt so bad to puke since there wasn’t anything to puke up except the IV fluid.  During the night, the nurses came in every hour to check my vitals.  I didn’t get any sleep at all.  Not a wink. 

The next day I was feeling a little better than the day before so I ordered some wonderful hospital food and they checked me out.  I went and got a prescription of Oxycodine from the pharmacy and left that awful place.  We went to Safeway to pick up a few things and then we went home.  I took some medicine just to keep the pain from coming back.  We hung out most of the day on Friday, just kept it easy.  We tried some home made remedy to break up the kidney stone and I just ended up puking all over my bedroom wall.  We ended up going back to the hospital to see if there was anything else we could do.  The nurse just said to take the medicine to ease the pain and just wait until it comes out on its own.  We went home and watched TV.

On Saturday my dad called us with good news and bad news.  He wanted to talk to me first.  I wanted him to tell me the bad news first and then the good news.  He told me my cat Erving died and I just lost it…I never got to hear what the good news was.  Later on that day there was a football game against Stanford.  We walked over there from Boulder Creek and got there in time to get a good seat.  It was raining and miserable.  The game started and my pain came back.  I told my mom we had to go, I wouldn’t make it through the whole game.  So we left at the first quarter.  I felt bad for my mom because she has never been to a football game in Pullman and she still hasn’t.  We made the long walk back and it was indeed painful.  I walked hunched over pushing on my lower back to keep it from hurting a lot more.  We got back and I immediately took my pills.  Ten minutes later I felt like I was floating on clouds with no pain.  We watched the rest of the football game on FSN (Fox Sports Network).  We lost to Stanford 17-23.  The following day my mom packed up her stuff and got ready to go back home.  Two hours into her trip home, I went pee and out came the kidney stone.  I got some gloves and plucked it out of the toilet and saved it in a jar to show people.  Later on during the school year, my sister came to visit during her spring break and thought it was an empty jar and lost the kidney stone in the carpet.