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Gaffer Variety:
Kidney Stones V069:
By Willie Gaffer:
I have been hospitalized many times in my life. I do not particularly like hospitals, but I thank Minerva for them. I had another visit to one this week. It seems I had an attack of kidney stones. The pain was quite intense. In fact, it was so intense that I literally could not stand up straight. I was crouched over like a 60 year old linebacker who had made one too many hits. Even Mrs. Gaffer, who is pretty tough, had a tear in her eye when she witnessed my pitiful struggle to look brave. It's over now. Thank Minerva.
I never got into the hospital proper. Everything happened in the emergency room or, as the say on TV, the ER. They took some time to make sure of my problem. I have had this problem before and I knew what it was. I told them so too, but you know how doctors are. To be safe, they must make an independent finding.
Once they agreed with my diagnosis, they acted with great compassion. They loaded me up with morphine to deal with the pain. Then they sent me home with a prescription for Vicodin. When I say loaded me up, I mean big-time. I was drunk and hung over for the next two days. I could not walk straight or eat. In my system, a little bit of that stuff has a big effect. It is difficult for me to comprehend how people can enjoy that experience. I personally find it awful to feel that disconnected.
I noticed, this time in particular, how there have been
several salutary changes in how hospitals operate. As one example, the approach
to pain control has changed dramatically since my first hospital stay. That was
at
As I said, all of that has changed. They have discovered that timely and effective pain control promotes healing. Suffering is not good for us. It causes stress, which retards healing. That ought to be self-evident, but bullheadedness dies hard. There are still a few old timers around who refuse to coddle patients.
Now most of them have the one through ten scale of pain and they believe the patient. Medication is administered accordingly as the patient reports the pain. They treat pain as a serious impediment to healing rather than something the patient must just endure. This is all to the good. Doctors have changed, Nurses have changes, and hospital administrations have changed.
As to the Vicodin, it is a super strength painkiller, but I never needed it. So far as I can tell, I passed the stone while I was in the hospital. By the time the morphine wore off, the pain was gone. So I put the Vicodin in a drawer, just in case. I hope it will stay there.
Now, what the heck are kidney stones. For those of you who have never experienced them, I hope you never do. As stated in a medical bulletin I found on the web, kidney stones, one of the most painful of the urologic disorders, are not a product of modern life. In fact, they have been found in the ancient remains of humans. Kidney stones are also one of the most common disorders of the urinary tract. In the year 2000, patients made 2.7 million visits to health care providers and more than 600,000 patients went to emergency rooms for kidney stone problems. In the year 2006, I was one of those unfortunates.
But, what is a kidney stone? Again, according to the bulletin, a kidney stone is a hard mass developed from crystals that separate from the urine and build up on the inner surfaces of the kidney. Normally, urine contains chemicals that prevent or inhibit the crystals from forming. These inhibitors do not seem to work for everyone, however, so some people form stones. If the crystals remain tiny enough, they will travel through the urinary tract and pass out of the body in the urine without being noticed. Maybe so, but it did not happen that way for me. One of them got stuck.
For sure, it did eventually get unstuck and pass. That is what usually happens. Most kidney stones pass out of the body without any intervention by a physician. If they do not, a patient may be in for some serious medical intervention. So far, I have had two attacks and have been lucky. Although the pain was intense, I did recover.
Now for the worst part. I may or may not have this problem again. The literature gives us all kinds of hoopla, but the bottom line is, we don’t really know what causes those little buggers to form. They just do. It may have to do with diet, but what diet? No one knows. The only thing we know is, if you have had the problem, you are more likely to have it again. Sigh!
Here are some other tidbits from the bulletin. For unknown
reasons, the number of people in the
I think, from this info, that the formation of these nasty little things may be stress related. That is an idea I will keep in mind. There are many good reasons to avoid stress related reactions. This is just another one.
If you want more information about this problem, go where I went on the web.
National Kidney Foundation
Phone: 1–800–622–9010 or 212–889–2210
Email: info@kidney.org
Internet: www.kidney.org
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