Getting Stoned: When Kidneys Attack
SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
(My wife wrote a column for me this week because I was indisposed, which is to say I was in the hospital with agonizing abdominal pain. Emily tried to write it the way I would have, as if it was me writing. But it was shorter than my normal, and since I’m feeling a bit better now I thought I’d comment on her story. If you see it in parenthesis, it’s me – everyone knows how much I love parenthesis. Is there a plural for parenthesis? Parenthesizes?)
They say nothing is more painful than taxes.
(They’ve obviously never heard me sing.)
Yeah, they lied. And that’s why my wife is writing my column as I sleep off the medication.
Everything was going so well – we grabbed some quick food between the chiropractor’s office and the tax office, forgot a form, and didn’t have some of the calculations we needed. And that’s about the point when I decided that I should probably head to the ER about the rapidly developing, searing abdominal and back pain.
(You should have seen the look on the face of the tax preparer on hearing my announcement that I had to go to the hospital. Then again, maybe she’s used to it.)
The next three hours or so were pretty hazy, and included lots of diagnostic tests. Apparently, I passed a kidney stone either in the tax office (Their restroom, that is) or in the sample I gave once I got to the ER. (Now the docs think the stone passed from my kidney to my bladder, where it awaits round 2.) Between the convulsing in agony, yelling in pain, and heaving my guts up, the nurses told me I was “handling it better than most”. Yikes.
(Makes me wonder how others handle it, because I was a whiney basket case.)