Thursday, December 20, 2007
Did You Miss Me?
Nope. Ain't dead. Been a couple of times the past several weeks I wished I was dead. But I'm getting a little better now. It all started November 15, when I awoke that morning feeling as though I had been gut shot. After seeing me writhe around the bed like something out of The Exorcist, TFMCD suggested an excursion to the ER. I didn't argue.
They chilled me out with some morphine and ran me through some machines and told me I had a kidney stone. It was pretty big bastard at 8mm or so. As luck would have it, the human ureter - that little tube that drains the kidney into the bladder - is only about 3mm wide. So guess which little 8mm circular saw blade-looking bastard was going nowhere but into the walls of my kidney like a freakin' ginsu knife?
The doc said he'd pulverize it in using something called "shock wave lithotripsy." This ingenious device somehow crushes a kidney stone into sand without doing any damage to soft tissue. You then piss out the sand with no major problem, and you're good as new in 24-48 hours. Only problem was, the machine was booked for three weeks out. So, it was pop Percocet and drink massive quantities of water until it was my turn. My little friend tried to kill me for about a week, then backed off to some extent and just prodded me here and there for the next two weeks and made life generally miserable.
Finally, my day came. December 5th. Hallelujah! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! TFMCD took me to the hospital for the procedure that morning, and I was out, recovered from anesthesia, and headed home by noon.
That's when the real fun began. Within an hour, I was experiencing an indescribable, previously unimaginable pain. We tried the Percocet and the anti-nauseal medication provided. The pain and nausea laughed at them. Pain pills don't do much good when they make a u-turn as soon as they reach the stomach. After a few hours of this, the doc ordered us back to the ER.
It turns out that in about 1 in 1,000 cases, the lithotripsy actually does significant damage to the kidney while crushing the stone. Guess who was Lucky #1,000? Yep you guessed it. My own doc had done over a thousand of these procedures, and I was the first patient of his to experience this complication. So, take a kidney that is one giant hematoma, then squeeze it with violent vomiting, and you have a guy curled up on the floor begging for a bullet in the brainpan. I ended up in the hospital for several days, a sizeable portion of which I was mainlining morphine. I lost a lot of blood and was close to a transfusion when my body rallied. The kidney is healing, though taking it's sweet time doing so. It started working again, as evidenced by the bucketful of sand that finally came out of me. The vomiting pulled every muscle in my lower abdomen, and that pain was actually worse on some occasions than the damned kidney.
The muscles healed, but the kidney still hurts. My Percocet now manages the pain really well. The energy I lost along with all that blood has finally begun to return, though a walk to the end of the cul-de-sac and back still sends me straight back to my chair for a nap.
I lost 20lbs in two weeks. Nice result, I suppose, but I don't recommend the diet plan.
And now you know the story of the missing Crime Dog. I haven't had a drink since before all this started. I could really use a beer. I mean really, really use a beer.
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They chilled me out with some morphine and ran me through some machines and told me I had a kidney stone. It was pretty big bastard at 8mm or so. As luck would have it, the human ureter - that little tube that drains the kidney into the bladder - is only about 3mm wide. So guess which little 8mm circular saw blade-looking bastard was going nowhere but into the walls of my kidney like a freakin' ginsu knife?
The doc said he'd pulverize it in using something called "shock wave lithotripsy." This ingenious device somehow crushes a kidney stone into sand without doing any damage to soft tissue. You then piss out the sand with no major problem, and you're good as new in 24-48 hours. Only problem was, the machine was booked for three weeks out. So, it was pop Percocet and drink massive quantities of water until it was my turn. My little friend tried to kill me for about a week, then backed off to some extent and just prodded me here and there for the next two weeks and made life generally miserable.
Finally, my day came. December 5th. Hallelujah! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! TFMCD took me to the hospital for the procedure that morning, and I was out, recovered from anesthesia, and headed home by noon.
That's when the real fun began. Within an hour, I was experiencing an indescribable, previously unimaginable pain. We tried the Percocet and the anti-nauseal medication provided. The pain and nausea laughed at them. Pain pills don't do much good when they make a u-turn as soon as they reach the stomach. After a few hours of this, the doc ordered us back to the ER.
It turns out that in about 1 in 1,000 cases, the lithotripsy actually does significant damage to the kidney while crushing the stone. Guess who was Lucky #1,000? Yep you guessed it. My own doc had done over a thousand of these procedures, and I was the first patient of his to experience this complication. So, take a kidney that is one giant hematoma, then squeeze it with violent vomiting, and you have a guy curled up on the floor begging for a bullet in the brainpan. I ended up in the hospital for several days, a sizeable portion of which I was mainlining morphine. I lost a lot of blood and was close to a transfusion when my body rallied. The kidney is healing, though taking it's sweet time doing so. It started working again, as evidenced by the bucketful of sand that finally came out of me. The vomiting pulled every muscle in my lower abdomen, and that pain was actually worse on some occasions than the damned kidney.
The muscles healed, but the kidney still hurts. My Percocet now manages the pain really well. The energy I lost along with all that blood has finally begun to return, though a walk to the end of the cul-de-sac and back still sends me straight back to my chair for a nap.
I lost 20lbs in two weeks. Nice result, I suppose, but I don't recommend the diet plan.
And now you know the story of the missing Crime Dog. I haven't had a drink since before all this started. I could really use a beer. I mean really, really use a beer.
