People tell me that passing a kidney stone is as painful as giving birth. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never given birth, but after an entirely unexpected altercation with a kidney stone recently, I can confirm that it is really, really sore.
I guess it all started last Sunday night, when a little jagged crystal made ready to bomb drop down my ureter – the little tube thingy that connects your kidney to your bladder.
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I woke up in the morning with a slight ache in my side and a constant need to wee. I told my partner Sam that I had a sore in the groinical area. Yes, my knowledge of human anatomy is a little patchy, but you know what I mean... that's the region of your lower abdomen excluding all of the important bits. “I’ve got a stitch or something. Just below my tummy on the right side, nothing serious, just a niggle.”
From golf ball to cricket ball
Not surprisingly, the comment elicited a mere “Aha” of disinterest from under the pillow where I suspected Sam’s head to be located. By the time I had made breakfast, however, I felt decidedly more uncomfortable - as though a hard foreign object, about the size of a golf ball, had invaded my nether regions and was now competing for space with all of the other internal organ type things that normally inhabit that immediate vicinity.
Driving our sons Josef (8) and Benjamin (6) to school that morning was a mistake. I realised this the moment I was truly and properly stuck in traffic and it was too late to turn back. The golf ball had grown into a cricket ball.
I was breaking out in a cold sweat and struggling to shake off images from the book I was reading which describes people infected with the Marburg virus. Think graphic details of liquefying internal organs. Not ideal when you’re trying to pep yourself up so as not to pass out in the middle of rush-hour traffic.
Time for hospital
I managed to drop off the boys, both of them blissfully unaware of daddy’s growing agony, and nearly checked myself into hospital on the way back home. Something was definitely wrong, but I had no idea what it was. Walking through the door back home, my face must have been suitably sick-looking: Sam was out of bed in a flash and driving me and my bowling ball to the MediClinic.
The nurses on duty, bless their cotton socks, were a picture of professional calm and detachment. Other than offering me an examination bench to lie down on, they weren’t going to commit to any intervention without the say-so from a doctor. The fact that I was in utterly excruciating pain by now and didn’t know whether to pace up and down the corridor, sit down and cry or just faint, seemed to make little impression on them.
After wading through a jungle of admissions paperwork and being told to wait our turn, Sam lost her patience, stormed into the nearest doctor’s room and extracted the good man who turned out to be somewhat taken aback, but nevertheless Hypocratically sympathetic.
Quick diagnosis
A urine sample quickly identified the source of my agony as a kidney stone and I was given several injections of painkillers and anti-inflammatories and after about 15 minutes the pain finally abated.
The doctor told the story about kidney stones being as painful as labour, “but then”, he added with a smirk “most men seem to think any level of pain is as bad as giving birth”, which, I guess, explains the apparent disinterest of the nursing staff.
Among kidney stones, he said, “the smallest dog barks the loudest”. Large stones get stuck in the kidney and although they too cause tummy and lower back aches and may require more intervention to be eliminated, it’s the little fellows that are the real balls of fire and the source of the most abominable abdominal pain known to “man”. Luckily most of them eventually manage to make their way to the outside world without assistance.
Liberation
Encouraged to drink a lot of fluids and fortified with strong pain medicine (I forget the pharmaceutical name of the stuff, but I shall forever refer to it as “Bliss”), I was sent home. I spend the rest of the day in bed, woozily medicated, and by evening, most of the birthing pain was gone together with the bowling ball – I must have liberated the kidney stone into the freedom of the toilet bowl at some point. Good riddance, little monster!
In the end, I guess I got away pretty well. A colleague tells me he’s been in hospital for kidney stones twice. Once, he says, he was “in labour” for 16 hours... on morphine, nogal! So is it really as sore as childbirth? I still don’t know, but believe me, it’s plenty sore enough!
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