We were talking tonight about all the various terrible 4th of Julys I've had I consider it a blessing to have sailed through this one relatively painlessly. But last year still haunts me every time I get the tiniest inkling of pain in my side, as it was the year I had my first kidney stone. Now, I didn't even know what a kidney stone was until I had one - I thought it was something the size of a small egg that somehow gets zapped by a laser and comes out of some opening or other. It didn't even sound that painful ("gall stones" wins that category) but if anybody reading this has ever had one, I am with you in a silent, wincing fraternity.
What's weird is how immediately you know something's wrong: not in the "gee, that feels kind of funny" way, it's in the "I really need to go to the hospital right now" category. Your body is taken to a higher place, a heightened state of alert that truly has to be experienced to be understood. You've had pain before, you've sprained ankles, bitten your tongue, had a headache, but this is something else, a primal yowl from the depths of ancestors eight generations back. They say that the pain of a kidney stone is ten times that of natural childbirth, which, I admit, lessens my male guilt a few notches for having experienced it.
What's worse is that I thought I could dodge it. I kept on playing the guitar, trying to learn the verses of That's Why I'm Here by James Taylor as the dagger plunged ever further. Three things I remember on the 45-minute drive to the hospital in the middle of rural Massachusetts: the unrelenting beauty of the scenery when the blood has drained from your eyes and blown out the aperture; watching Tessa drive and remembering the Smiths lyric "to die by your side, what a wonderful way to die"; and the warning on the shotgun air bag saying that it could cause immediate death. Not knowing what a kidney stone was, or that I had one, I believed I was close to death, and thought to myself "this is how it feels." And they're right, you know, death itself doesn't seem that bad; it's when your body decides to survive, that's when the pain hits.
Spare the details, thanks, but suffice to say I threw up all over the hospital while the fireworks of the 4th of July boomed overhead. 15 hours of unmitigated agony produced a long Percoset-induced sleep at the end of which, I "passed" the stone into a little screened cup. I like to include visual aids with this blog, so this is today's picture:
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Yep, that was the size of it. A period. I kept it in a little hospital jar for analysis at some later date, but I never took it in for research. It rested on my office shelf for months until it developed into a totem, a reminder that something so small can have such an effect on the world. And furthermore, that I had survived it, that it was no longer in me, and though I may be knocked flat by other beasts, this one didn't get me.
And so I leave you with this, fair readers: drink all those glasses of water they tell you to! Hydrate like crazy and the stones will roll right through you. Drink! Drink! All God One Love! Dilute! Dilute! OK!!!
Posted by at August 13, 2002 8:26 PM