Chips off the Old Block

During Trace's birthday celebrations, I had a fair amount of pain going on. I didn't think it was anything to be concerned about, but it kept getting worse. Finally, I had decided I should do something. I had a hair appointment the early morning of the 28th and I barely made it through it. I was sitting in the chair silently while my hair stylist tried to work as fast a possible, and another customer stopped at our section and said; "I'm sorry, but I'm a nurse and you really don't look good. You need to go to the hospital." I thought that was amazing! Instead, I went to work planning to work the whole day, but the moment I got off the elevator, my assistant, Kim Keisker took one look at me and said; "Come on, we're going to the hospital." She grabbed my keys and drove me in my car to the nearest hospital. After a few hours in the ER, the doctor on call came in and said; "Well, I've been in the ER for 15 years and I've never seen this before. You seem to have TWO kidney stones that are blocking each ureter and making it so you've had little to no kidney functions for what appears to be several days". Unbelievable! The funny thing is, that when he told me that, I imagined that these two stones both left the kidneys at the same time and parallelly blocked each ureter in the same spot. In reality, one turned out to be almost into my bladder and one was close to my kidney. Basically, I was in full kidney failure due to the blockages. I called Kevin from the ER and he said; "Are you headed home?", to which I replied; "No, I'm heading in to emergency surgery." They needed to place stents in each ureter and they removed one of the kidney stones. The funny thing is that the surgeon that was on call, happened to be Kevin's urologist, Dr. Peter Caputo. He decided that we needed to put in the two stents and leave them in the entire time I was on our upcoming cruise. I did a lot of investigating and researching and some people said that the stents weren't uncomfortable at all. I was the exact opposite! I almost would have rather had the kidney stone pain rather than the stents.....almost. As soon as I took 5 steps, I was in extreme pain. It seemed to take a mental toll on me as well, it had been a long time since I'd been that depressed and hopeless feeling. I think I just have a sensitivity to foreign objects in my body. Ugh. It was no fun. The day after we got back from the cruise, I went in for another surgery to switch the stents and remove the other, higher kidney stone. Then, one week after that, I went in for office removal of the stents. I had stents in my ureters for about 4.5 weeks! I was grateful that the kidney failure was found before I left the country, but it was quite the ordeal and I was so thankful when it was over.