Ouch

Hey everybody, Chris here, and have I got a story for you.  It all starts three Saturdays ago when Katie and I went to the gym for a workout.  I ran on the treadmill, lifted a few weights, and finished up with some ab exercises.  About fifteen minutes later, I started feeling a very intense pain in the lower left side of my back.  I thought that maybe I had pulled a back muscle or something working out, as I am not the finely tuned athletic machine that I once was.  But the pain kept intensifying, and would come in waves about 45 minutes apart.  Each wave of pain hurt terribly and I would feel like I was about to throw up (which, if you recall, I have never done in my life).  We started to think that it was possibly a kidney stone, since those seem to run in my family.  After a couple hours of this I was all set to go to the emergency room, but then the pain slowly subsided and eventually was gone.  And that was the end of it until about 12:30 am last Monday night/Tuesday morning.

That's when I woke up feeling an eerily similar pain to the one I described above.  It kept getting steadily worse, and at about 1:20 am I told Katie that I needed her to take me to the ER.  So she drove me to the hospital, which is thankfully only about a 5 minute drive.  By the time we got there, I couldn't stand upright anymore so I hobbled into the waiting room like an old lady while Katie checked me in.  The nurse brought me a bin for my nausea while I waited to be seen, and pretty soon a nurse came and got me.  I gave them a urine sample and the nurse took some blood from me, and then Katie and I waited in my hospital room.  While they were presumably waiting for results from those tests, the pain became pretty much the worst thing that I've ever experienced in my life, and that includes having seen the first twilight movie.

Katie went and found the nurse, who came back to give me some pain medicine.  She asked me what my pain level was on this chart (I said the second face from the right), and then she gave me an IV of Toradol.

I waited for the pain to go away, but it just kept getting worse.  The doctor came in for the first time and told me that he was ordering a CT scan because it sounded like a kidney stone.  The nurse came back a few minutes later, and I told her that the pain was still pretty terrible, so she gave me some Dilaudid through the IV.  Jackpot.  About 2 minutes later I was feeling faaaantastic.  If somebody ever offers your some Dilaudid, you do not say no.

Dilaudid. Wheeeeeeeeee

So I got the CT scan, and the doctor came back about a half an hour later, and sure enough it was a kidney stone.  It was 5 mm, which he said was borderline between whether I should pass it or whether it should be broken up, but he told me I could pass it.  I wanted to tell him what I thought of that decision, but I'm not a doctor, so I held back.  They gave me some medicine for pain, nausea, and to help me pass it, and we were out of the hospital and back in bed by about 4:30 am.

It was a pretty regular work week for me, and I didn't have much pain except for some on Friday.  Every Tuesday we have an FCA Bible Study in our building, and my prayer request today was just that the kidney stone would take care of itself.  Somebody closed us in prayer, and then I ran to the bathroom before I had a meeting.  And wouldn't you know it, not more than 3 minutes after somebody prayed for me, I finally passed it.  So there is your power of prayer story of the day.

I am super relieved that this is over with, and hopefully I won't have any repeat occurrences.  For those of you interested in what this monstrosity looks like that caused me enough pain that I would rather listen to Lady Gaga on repeat, scroll down.  If you will be grossed out, then for the love of all that is holy do not look down any further.  And that's the story of my kidney stone.