Choose Your Own Adventure – Kidney stone style.

I’ve been dealing with a rather pesky kidney stone in my left kidney since last October. I was rather annoyed with it because I had just eradicated one in my right kidney seven months prior, so I wasn’t really in the mood. All the same, there it was. And it still is. And probably will always be, world without end, amen.

Except, maybe not, because I have Big Plans. BIG PLANS, I say!

Ahem. Anyway. Said big plans started brewing last week when I had a sudden attack of OHMYGOD Kidney Stone, You Hurt! Usually he just sits there quietly, unless I get it into my fool head to try to work out. Working out, or shaking my (adorably cute) tail, or otherwise ricocheting my kidney stone against my kidney is strictly verboten. But I was saying, last week I had a twinge – a small one, perhaps an imaginary one – on my right side, which I promptly ignored and filed under Sympathy Pains. Then there was the Game That Did Not Happen and a related beer binge (beer is prohibited under Kidney Stone Prevention rules) and all of a sudden I was having counter-clenching, stop-in-the-middle-of-a-sentence-to-scream kind of pain. The kind of pain most men I’ve talked to assume I’m in all the time with this pesky little kidney stone. Then my bladder spasms and the feeling that I was being stabbed in my cervix with knitting needles – you know, like last time I had a kidney stone – came back and so I called Dr. Hotshot and got myself an appointment. As much fun as nightly Vicodin is, it’s probably not healthy.

That is how I found myself at the x-ray store technician’s on Tuesday morning, bright and shiny. In order to get my x-rays covered at 100% – as opposed to having a $130 co-pay – I have to go to the facility across the street from Dr. Hotshot and it has to be the day before so they have time to send the digital images to my doctor’s office. However, because Dr. Hotshot is pretty thorough, he also requires physical films, which is how I came to be in possession of my x-ray for 24-hours.

Giving me – a known hypochondriac girl with an imagination that could rival Stephen King, Jim Henson, and daytime soap scriptwriters all thrown together – my x-rays without supervision is a bad, bad idea. I pulled my x-ray out of my jeep (where it was kept so I wouldn’t forget it) about 20 times Tuesday night. Dr. Hotshot had shown me my kidney stone last October; I was confident I could find it again. I just wanted to see if it had moved, if it suddenly had some little friends, or if the absence of pain over the past two days meant it had vacated the premises during that 48-hour period I lovingly remember as Screamfest 2011.

Turns out, x-rays are a little harder to read than one might think.

I couldn’t find anything labeled “kidney stone.” I didn’t see anything that looked even a little stone-ish. I could see my kidneys, my lungs, a bottom rib or two, and lots of other stuff. There were lots of shadows and a coupla flecks. But nothing obvious. Crap – maybe I didn’t have any stones. But I was in pain! Why was I in pain? Was it all in my head? Was the doctor going to call me a crackhead (almost quite literally) and send me on my way?

Meh, meh, meh. I consulted Dr. Google. “Finding kidney stones on x-rays” only gave me a few results. Okay, not really: there were 13,000 results and only a few useful examples. And my x-ray didn’t resemble any of them. Finally, I determined that I either had three kidney stones or none. I shouldn’t have wasted my time getting to undergraduate degrees and a crappy job and instead gone to x-ray school.

I had to wait all the way until Wednesday at lunch time to get my results from Dr. Hotshot. Almost predictably, he told me that I still had just the one stone and it had moved a little – away from the exit. Apparently, kidney stones of this size almost always (70% of the time) pass on their own. But it could take years. I have gone up a pants size, people – things are dire. So we talked about options – continued to manage with pain meds and wait, or to schedule surgery. I opted for the surgery. Yes, it’s pricey. $2,000 kind of pricey. But I am not really comfortable taking Vicodin every night, nothing else calms the pain post-workout or by the end of most days – and I want to get back to a healthy lifestyle. I miss running and dancing and shaking my thang for no reason at all.

So! Mark your calendars. You may start sending me oodles of sympathy and compliments and other lovely emails around the 3rd of March – my day o’ exciting lithotripsy. If you want to send gobs of money, I wouldn’t exactly turn that away either. Heck, I might even call to thank you while I’m incredibly high post-surgery. That, my friends, is entertaining enough to be worth every penny!

My life – it is never really exactly dull, is it?

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Tags: kidney stone, surgery