A Rolling Stone Only Causes Pain

There is a demon in the mist.  It rears it's terrifying jagged body with razor sharp edges as it emerges from the dark like a flame from the deepest bowels of Hell.  It burns and it tortures, it makes its presence known through the agonizing moans that seem to take over our voices like a body possessed and in need of exorcism.  It's body scrapes and tears us like the claws of a rabid animal dragging against the soft flesh of the belly. 

Only some of us know this pain.  It is not universal, it seems to be more congenital.  For some reason some have a propensity for it yet no one really knows why.  Women have generously claimed it is the closest pain a man will ever know to child birth yet as one friend reminded me, at least child birth has an eventual positive outcome.  At least a woman can relinquish her pain to an epidural. 

I am now in the midst of my second major bout with kidney stones.  The term seems rather innocuous, it conjures images of a smooth pebble resting peacefully before the shimmering waves of a clear bubbling mountain brook. Despite this seemingly bucolic image I can testify to the fact that it is more reminiscent of jagged piece of rock hard dead coral sawing against your innards like a the teeth of a saw tearing at a soft piece of wood.  The experience reminds me of an art project related to migraine headaches I once read about.  It was a simple exhibition of drawings by those that experience them illustrating what happens in their minds.  The result was ghoulish to say the least.  Swirls of flaming colors in nightmarish twists.

When you are prone to kidney stones you know they are there.  You can feel a certain reminder in your body from time to time.  It is like the sound of a distant train moving toward the spot you are standing near a railway track.  Eventually, the train appears as if out of no where and passes with the force of a tidal wave crashing against the shore.

Mine hit at around four in the morning accompanied by a heavy dose of agony.  Like anything the first stage is denial but it quickly becomes apparent that denial is getting you no where as you pace back and forth with periodic toilet breaks that seemingly have no point.  "Why?  Why?" You ask as if someone is actually listening. 

Like a woman giving birth I eventually had to tell my wife that it was time to go to the hospital.  We set off in the darkness for our local medical center only to find out that emergencies only happen there between the hours of 8am to 10pm.  "ER."  I mumbled and moaned.  We set off back down the road when I pleaded for her to pull over.  Modesty becomes non-existent in the face of pain and clinging to the side of a dumpster I heaved and tried to pee.  I was half expecting one of our local Police Department's finest to approach me and site me for public drunkenness. 

Back on the road I passed what seemed like an eternity but was likely ten minutes, before arriving at the hospital.  I half expected a waiting room packed with gunshot victims but found it strangely vacant.  It was a simple gift from God. 


I was escorted back to a bed and lay helplessly as a nurse prepped my arm for relief.  In the midst of it all a man rolled in a cart and commenced asking for my insurance card and payment details.  Thankfully my wife was there to deal with him as I received an initial narcotic before they wheeled me off for a CT scan of my gut.  Everyone has their stories about medical care in America but as I reflect I have to question a system that is more concerned with getting payment details than actually treating the illness.  This is not to disparage the nurses or the doctors, it just seems like the last thing a person writhing in pain should be concerned with is producing an insurance card.  Even with insurance I can still only wonder what this all cost me.  It makes me question what is next, perhaps the nurse will present you with a list of costs for all services and I will decide which ones to receive.  Yes, I will take the catheter but the pain killer is just too expensive.

With the presence of my stone verified the nurse commenced injecting me with a second pain killer that while tightening my chest at first soon made my body go numb.  This was truly the good stuff.  It must have been a cousin of Demerol but even stronger. 

There was an incessant beeping coming from the monitor above my head.  I wondered if I was going into cardiac arrest before a nurse reassured me that it was just "acting up."  The doctor attempted to deal with it pushing on things futilely.  I wanted to say to him sarcastically, "Sure, you can slice me open but you can't fix a beeping monitor." 

Medical professionals amaze me.  I can't imagine a job where you deal with so much pain on a daily basis yet try to summon compassion with each case.  It is no wonder that I often have found them to be some of the least healthy people I know.  The nurse that removed my injection port smelled of tobacco.  The doctor had a gut overlapping his waist line and looked like he had just finished his third Double Whopper with Cheese of the night. 

I had my first introduction to kidney stones years ago before I suffered from them myself.   I was living in Bolivia at the time and my friend Alfredo had to go for a procedure to have a stone broken up in his body.  It was too large to pass and the famed Bolivian urologist Dr. Ramiro de la Rocha expert in all maladies of the pipi had decided to conduct lithotripsy or what is commonly known as a water massage.   The procedure sounded almost pleasant.  You sat in a bath and the stone was hit with sound waves to break it up.  Alfredo was living alone and I insisted on going with him.  He went into the the massage standing upright and in generally good physical condition.  An hour later he appeared in a beaten drugged out state.  So much for images of sexy Bolivian nurses delicately massaging out a demonic stone.  Alfredo insisted I put him in a taxi and send him home yet images in my mind of him getting rolled and left on the side of the road prevented this.  Instead I took him home and left him in his misery.

With all the progress in medical science you would think that some form of Draino for the kidney would have been invented by now.  Alas, we seem to be the most common yet most forgotten medical condition.  So now I drink water and pray to hear the clink of a bb shot from my nether regions in to a strainer that I pathetically cling to.  Why can't growing old be dignified?  Is there a way to make this sexy?  These are the questions I ponder as pray the next one won't be quite so bad.  Now I leave you for another bathroom break.  Take flight demon, in the name of my sanity I hereby exorcise you!!!