The drive home was uneventful. I took a Percocet in the morning; the warning on the bottle said to ‘be careful’ when driving, so I figured it wasn’t going to knock me out. It didn’t.
We were celebrating Jack’s birthday for dinner, but after eating a little, I found the pain was beginning to escalate, so I took another Percocet and went to lay down. By 9 p.m., I was again in full blown kidney stone attack and the Percocet had all the effect of a jelly bean. The real hurt was on the way.
I couldn’t sleep or find any comfort through the night and began throwing up around 3 a.m. By 7 a.m., I knew I would be returning to the emergency room and found myself there by 8:30 a.m. I took my paperwork from the hospital in Potsdam as I thought the blood work could prove important and it did. It took two hours of intense pain for them to finally give me some dilaudid, a powerful opiate that brought instant relief. When I could once again speak without clenching my teeth, I questioned what was happening.
“That shit was really good. Why in the f&*k did you wait so long to give it to me?
They had some bullshit reasoning and it was some time before the Urologist finally joined me to give me some understanding of what was happening.
“Your left kidney is functioning quite poorly. We have the results from Saturday and in two days, it’s declined by half. We need to move that stone by pumping you full of fluids, or we’re going to have to put a stent in there to get around it,” he said.
I had a job interview scheduled for 4 p.m., or in about four hours and told him so. He wasn’t too interested.
“We need to admit you. You’re very sick and we have to continue to pump in the fluids and see if the stone passes.”
“I can go to the interview and come right back here for the night. This is important and could affect the rest of my life,” I said.
“Your kidney will definitely affect the rest of your life,” he said, but was weakening and finally agreed.
I was administered some more dilaudid; the pain had me writhing again. It had been less than two hours since my last shot and I started thinking this dose would wear out just about the point that the interview was scheduled to begin. Falling to the floor and yelling ‘somebody shoot me’ would probably do little to impress the interviewers. I decided to cancel and stay in the hospital.
They moved me to a room and on the ride in my bed to this new location, the dilaudid wore off and I had the worst attack to date. I had to get out of the bed and was rolling around on the floor of the room trying to find a comfortable position knowing no such thing existed. The nurse did not have my records yet (not sure why the computer from the emergency room didn’t have instant access by the nurse on the fourth floor), so I was forced to go through twenty minutes of hell waiting for my next injection. Clearly, this stone was stressing the hell out of my kidney and the hospital was the place for me.
I spent the evening in a dilaudid haze, getting up to pee into my bottle every hour. No stone passed and as morning approached, I knew surgery was on the way.
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