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Tales of a Kidney Stone (Part 4)

This is the fourth part of several on my kidney stone adventures. Read parts one, two, and three first.

So after my night of extreme pain, I went exactly a week without any pain at all. Then once again, just before lunch on Wednesday I started feeling the all-too-familiar pain, skipped book club (I promise I actually like book club and this wasn’t an elaborate excuse) and jumped in the car. Because I am a relatively bright fellow, and because I learn from my mistakes, I didn’t not even think about going home. I drove myself directly to the hospital. I did not pass go, and I certainly did not collect $200. Although I ended up going to the emergency room again, I first tried calling the Harris family practice clinic where my doctor is. It seemed to me, since I knew what was wrong, and all I really needed was a shot of some drugs that actually worked to keep the pain down for a the worst of it, that I could go in, they give me the shot and I could hang out till someone could come get me. When I called the doctor’s office and said I had a kidney stone, was in a lot of pain, and could I come in a get something to help, she offered to schedule an appointment for the next day. Gee thanks. And thus I went to the emergency room.

This whole emergency room thing was becoming pretty old hat by now, so it was nice they threw in a few curveballs to keep things interesting. The first thing happened at reception and had me seriously wondering what I might have done during the first narcotic-based loopiness. It started with the usual questions: name, social, allergies, etc. Then he wanted to confirm that I was married. Excuse me?! Somehow during the first visit, they had gotten it into their system that Amy was my wife. Amy assures me that no such thing happened, and thus I had them correct their records. Later, once I was drugged and resting, a woman came in and started asking me a bunch of questions that I just didn’t understand. Apparently there was another J. Goforth in the emergency room at the same time. I was getting the wrong set of questions, which made me very glad for all the times they asked my name and birthday before injecting me with all kinds of stuff. Also, to add to the parallels with child-birth, because of various pains and as a precautionary measure, they decided to do an ultrasound of “things”. And that is all I will say about that visit.

A few hours later, I drove myself home. It was really a pretty tame incident, but that was probably because I had it attended to very quickly. The important thing it did was got one more CT scan to show that the kidney stone (which Amy had named Lester by this point) was still there and not moving. This prompted the urologist to give the go ahead for surgery to remove the thing.

The tale of the kidney stone surgery will continue in the next exciting adventure of the kidney stone. Same blog time, same blog channel.