I had an interesting Easter weekend. While most spend the holiday with family, chowing down on turkey and painting eggs, I was tethered to an IV drip and stuck in a hospital bed.
Fear not, it’s nothing serious – although it was seriously painful. A few hours after I awoke to a crippling pain in my abdomen, I was informed that I had an infection in my left kidney, and a pair of stones to boot.
While it wasn’t the ideal holiday weekend, it could have been a lot worse. It may have thrown a wrench in my gears, and left me feeling sore for days to come, but the care I received at the St. Therese Healthcare Centre here in St. Paul was enough for me to qualify the weekend as a success (all things considered).
While I had to spend my holiday in hospital, there were a number of nurses and doctors who spent their holiday taking care of me. There were times where I can’t imagine I was easy to deal with – as I’ll admit the pain brought me to the point of screaming, and even caused me to lose consciousness on more than occasion – and I thank everyone at the hospital who put up with me during that time.
To put it bluntly – and without going into too much detail – it felt as though someone had stuffed my kidney full of shattered glass and began squeezing it like a stress ball.
A word of advice to all you readers out there: increase your water consumption and decrease your caffeine intake. Over the past year or so I’ve been known to replace real sustenance with coffee in an attempt to handle morning office hours and evening sporting events, but it seems those days are over.
If you think you’re not at risk for kidney stones, think again. Being only 26 years old I never contemplated the potential of getting stones, but low and behold they hit, they hit me hard, and there almost no warning signs. I went to bed with a mild stomach ache on Friday evening, and awoke in so much pain that I feared for my life.
Thanks to the caring nature of the employees at St. Therese, I quickly realized that wasn’t the case, and while I was in for a painful road ahead, they were there to ease my worries with kind words, and ease my pain with the sweet numbness of Morphine and Toradol.
After a difficult waiting period, the stones have finally passed. Absolutely nothing about this situation was fun, but I’m happy to say it’s finally over, and once again I’m feeling good.
