#ive been awake for 18 hours (since 4am)

[possum-apologist]

fun times in the hospital

[blazehedgehog]

I hope you are recovering from the kidney stones well, and sorry to hear about the pain you suffered! What lead up to it?

Kidney stones just happen to some people. There are a variety of causes. Some of them are dietary, some of them are just kind of random. I’m pretty sure in my case, it was a combination of both diet and side effects of a home remedy.

Bad teeth kind of run in the family a little bit. My mom had her first dentures when she was 19. I will probably need dentures at some point in my life (and maybe soon, the way things in there feel sometimes). Because of the history of bad teeth, my Mom let me know of an old home remedy for toothaches: Vitamin C. Most toothaches are some form of an infection, and Vitamin C boosts your immune system, so if you bulk up on it, you can let your body’s natural defenses take care of the toothache without having to see a dentist for antibiotics.

This comes from a dentist my Mom visited in the 70′s or 80′s, who prescribed her 22,000mg of Vitamin C per day for a tooth infection. Over my years of having occasional toothaches, I’d usually take maybe a quarter of that, but a few years ago I ended up hitting the 22,000mg number because I had a particularly bad toothache that just wouldn’t go away, and at the time, we just couldn’t afford to go to a dentist.

The toothache eventually subsided but I didn’t like taking so much Vitamin C (for one thing, that much started giving me an upset tummy). My Mom assured me there were no side effects, and that it was impossible to overdose on it. I was skeptical.

So I looked in to it. Turns out, there was ONE side effect of taking excessive amounts of Vitamin C: an increased risk of kidney stones, as I guess the excess minerals in the vitamin tablets can coalesce in to a stone. So for years, I always had that hanging over my head, knowing that probably some day, that would be a problem I’d have to deal with.

As for what it felt like, well, I’ll hide that behind a “read more” tag for people who are squeamish.

To be perfectly honest with you, this is actually the second kidney stone I’ve passed – the first one was right after New Years 2017. I didn’t tell anyone on the internet about this (that I can remember), it was something I largely kept to myself because I was embarrassed.

I think it was around January 3rd that I woke up, went to the bathroom, and as I was going it kind of burned a little bit. Nothing outrageously painful, but definitely uncomfortable. Obviously I started to panic, but I figured I’d give it 24 hours, see if it kept happening, and then decide where to go from there. By the end of the 24 hours (morning #2), I’d made a realization: the pain was moving, slowly, down my urinary tract. Every time I’d go to the bathroom, it would move a little closer to the, uh, “tip.”

Something was in there, and it was going to come out. I knew it had to be a kidney stone. I’d known from looking up kidney stones from Vitamin C that there’s not really a way to “treat” stones. Most doctors prescribe painkillers to manage the pain and you just have to pass it on your own. Only in extreme cases with urinary tract blockages (read: you can’t pee) are more invasive treatment options considered, like ultrasound to blast the stone in to dust, or surgery to physically remove it.

So I started guzzling water in an effort to push the thing out. By the morning of the third day, it felt like it was right there, like I should be able to physically see it if I looked. Were kidney stones big enough to see with the naked eye? To be honest, I didn’t know. But I kept guzzling water and sure enough, right before bed that night, I got a split second of VERY intense pain, and then it vanished. I didn’t see anything drop in to the toilet bowl, so I figured that, no, I guess maybe kidney stones were just too small to see with the naked eye. I flushed, went to bed, and that would have been the end of it.

About a week later, I stood up off the toilet from having a “bowel movement” and noticed in the toilet bowl a little strip of pink where my urine had been splashing. Blood, in other words. Welp, there was no avoiding it now, I needed to go see a doctor. Doctor confirmed what I already knew: it was probably a kidney stone, and it probably just tore some stuff up on its way out and that’s what was bleeding. The bleeding should stop within a couple weeks. And it did.

And then it came back. Every 4-8 weeks, I’d stand up from sitting on the toilet to another pink stripe of blood on the bowl. Since the doctor told me that was normal, I tried not to worry about it. The further away from January I got, the less frequent finding blood in the toilet became. I was healing, just slowly. Everything was fine. Probably.

Nine months later, we’ll say around September 2nd (a Saturday), I woke up with an INTENSE burning pain in my back on the left side. It made me feel sick. I didn’t even want to move. The day before, me and my Mom had been going through a storage unit out here in Nevada looking for a specific item that we’d packed that we needed now. I figured I’d thrown my back out. That’s happened to me before. As I sat up, over the next 20-30 minutes, the pain faded away and vanished. Fair enough, maybe it was just a cramp or something. But for the next two days, I felt incredibly nauseous. And, by the end of the second day, not only did I notice another pink strip of blood in the toilet bowl, but something about my urine just did not smell right (in the sense that it did not smell like pee normally smells).

I tried not to think about it, even though I knew what the symptoms meant. It got to be harder to ignore when, every single time I had to sit down for a bathroom visit, I’d stand up to a little bit of blood in the toilet bowl. Every. Single. Time.

Uh oh.

Thursday the 7th rolls around and I’m up late as usual, when, around 3 or 4am, the pain in my back comes back. It grows, slowly, in waves. The pain would peak, and then fall off over a period of 20-30 minutes, only to come back even stronger on the next go around. “This is it.” I thought. I filled a big glass of water and chugged it down, then filled it up again, and made it about halfway through the second glass.

Nothing happened. I mean, literally, nothing happened. I was sloshing around with something like a liter of water in me and nothing was coming back out. It felt like I had to go, but I’d push and I’d push to a couple of droplets. Instead, the pain was getting more intense more quickly. I couldn’t stand up anymore. I rolled around on the floor of my bedroom, and later the floor of the bathroom, as I began sweating bullets from the pain, which was now beginning to move across my side to my bladder. I was in so much pain it was becoming difficult to think clearly. A good example is that it was like the feeling a man gets when they’re kicked in the groin, except it not only never goes away, it just keeps getting more intense over time. I have never in my life felt pain like this.

Finally, 7am rolled around, and I couldn’t take it any longer. I was dying. At the very least, I feared a blockage. I hobbled my way down the hall to where my Mom was staying, and I woke her up. “We’ve got a big problem.”

“Why? What now?” she asked, barely awake.

“I think I need to go to the hospital.”

We hadn’t gotten any of our medical insurance transferred to Nevada yet, so going to the doctor was going to be expensive. But I couldn’t stand it anymore. I explained to her that I hadn’t been able to go to the bathroom for a few hours despite drinking a huge amount of water, and just like that, she began looking up hospitals for me.

The emergency room visit took about six hours. They put me on an IV, gave me some painkillers, did a CAT scan of my abdomen, drew blood and had me pee in a cup (which, perhaps because of the painkillers, had upgraded from a few droplets to a tiny trickle). The doc came in and confirmed: Yep! It’s a kidney stone. Fortunately, not big enough to require surgery – stones up to 5 or 6mm typically pass on their own, and mine was in the 3mm range, and according to the doc, it was “almost out.”

I received a prescription for Percocet (for the pain) and Zofran (for the nausea) and was sent packing, but not without some advice from the nurse:

I was advised to “stay on top” of the pain. I didn’t want to be trapped waiting for my Percocet to take hold with pain that intense. So basically, take regular dosages until the stone passes.

Both Percocet and Zofran would make me tremendously sleepy, so there was a good chance I was going to sleep through a lot of the pain.

The last items they gave me was a funnel with a filter inside of it – I was instructed to pee in to the funnel and catch the stone when it comes out, which I was then meant to take to a urologist for analysis. The other item was the container I was meant to put the stone in (a little plastic jar with a locking lid).

So I went home and I slept. And slept. And slept. Over the next two days, I slept so much that it was starting to get scary. I’d sleep 18 hours a day. I tried to go without my Percocet, but I still couldn’t stay awake. I had no energy. It took me 20 minutes to unfold a camping chair in my bedroom for me to sit in because I kept needing to rest after exerting the smallest amount of movement. And when I’d take a deep breath, there was this kind of aching pain around the periphery of my lungs. After practically falling a sleep mid-sentence telling my Mom about all this (I was nearly in tears, I only remember weakly saying “Something feels wrong and I don’t know what”), she decided it would be a good idea to talk to the hospital. They advised her I should be brought in immediately.

And thinking about it now, if it wasn’t for my Mom in this situation, I might be dead by now.

They diagnosed me with pneumonia. At some point in my drugged up stupor, they figure I must have aspirated (read: almost barfed and then some of that fluid went down the wrong pipe in to my lungs, and since I was so out of it, I never coughed it up). I was put on oxygen, given more CAT scans, more blood drawn, more study. One doctor used the term “septic” to describe what my lungs looked like. They were starting to collapse. So, I spent the weekend in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV, hooked up to a heart rate monitor, with even more medication. More pain killers, plus now antibiotics, and something called “Flomax” – medication normally reserved for men with prostate problems, it helps open the pipes and increase urine flow strength. In other words, they wanted that kidney stone out of me now.

By Tuesday the 12th, I was allowed to come back home. My pneumonia had cleared up quite a bit, I no longer needed an oxygen mask, and I was clawing at the walls to get out. I still had occasional back pain, but it was subsiding. Still hadn’t passed the stone, but that was irrelevant. I didn’t want to be there anymore.

As I got dressed and prepared to leave, the Doc made one final check in with me to say: “Don’t come back.” When I smiled at him, he smiled back. “I’m serious. I never want to see you in this hospital again.”

Now the prescriptions I was sent home with included more Percocet (for extreme pain), triple strength Ibuprofin (for mild pain, with the instructions that it should be taken with antacid pills), two types of antibiotics (for the pneumonia) and more Flomax (to push the stone out).

By September 14th, I started to notice this red-ish, ashy gravel in the urine filter they gave me. Was that the stone? Had it broken in to a thousand tiny pieces? Over the next few days, as I kept going, I kept peeing out more and more of this ashy stuff. It didn’t hurt, and there was getting to be a lot of it, in big chunks.

I later learned that this is normal in the symptoms of a kidney stone. This ashy stuff was coagulated blood and tissue from the kidney when the stone tore its way out.

Finally, on the afternoon of September 22nd, a BUNCH of the red ashy stuff came out, WAY more than ever before, and right as I felt like I was done peeing, I got a surprise little extra burst of urine at the end and a jolt of pain. Wait? Was that it? Nothing seemed to fall in to the filter, but… maybe that was it?

I dumped the ashy stuff in to the container and thought maybe it was over.

As I sat down, I noticed something felt different. For guys (at least some guys) when you shift around in your seat, your uh, “business” obviously moves around, too. And when that happened to me, I could… physically feel something. Something was in there. In the “final stretch” so to speak. It hadn’t come out yet. It was waiting for one last stream to make the last step of its journey. But every time I moved, I knew it was in there, because I could feel it move around in the “pipe.”

Finally, long about midnight, after a lot of holding it in and being worried about the pain and how much it might hurt to finally get this thing out of me, I just… went.

Plonk!

In to the filter drops what looks sort of like a big, hard, crusty booger. Bigger than a grain of rice, a little bit smaller than a pea. About a quarter of an inch, we’ll say. Compared to what I expected, it looks titanic. Monstrous, even. That was in me? That came out of there? It’s huge! A lot bigger than 3 milometers! (Wait. How big is a milometer?)

And… it didn’t hurt. At all. The jolt of pain I felt earlier in the afternoon must’ve been all there was. The stone finishing its journey, that last little bit of distance, didn’t hurt even a little bit. It basically just fell out right in to the filter.

Depending on how you look at it, this stone either took two weeks or nine and a half months to come out. And who knows! Maybe there’s more hiding in there. I’m also, at least for the next month, probably at an increased risk of kidney infections.

And for all the “oh it didn’t hurt” of that last leg, it really cannot be understated how much “flank” (back) pain I was in for almost a full week. It was literally unbearable.

But it’s over! For now! Hooray!

(Well, except for the pinched nerve the hospital bed gave me that has yet to clear up...)