I woke up early this morning, before the sun even came up, with a piercing pain in the left side of my abdomen for the fourth time this month. It was worse than the other three times, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I shook my wife awake and told her I needed her to drive me to the hospital.
The doctors x-rayed me, CAT scanned me, and diagnosed me (not at all to my surprise) with a 6mm kidney stone.
They gave me a tightly-controlled narcotic called dilaudid through an IV. It dropped the pain from an 8 on a 1 to 10 scale down to a 0.5 in a matter of seconds. Whoever developed that stuff has my blessing and gratitude—as long as it wasn’t the Taliban. Their product is rather similar, I understand. I’m pretty sure I forgot my own name before it wore off.
That infernal rock is still in me, and while the pain is manageable at the moment (it’s only back up to a 3), I’ve been told this could last as long as a week and can get a whole lot worse very suddenly without any warning. I have to take another narcotic by mouth every four hours if I want to stay out of the hospital. Both driving and writing will be out of the question. I just collected my prescription from the pharmacy and will start now.
This is not going to kill me, but blogging could be light for a while.
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