kidney stones are oodles of fun

Please note sarcasm.

Anyway, I got New Hire to drive me to the hospital at 12:30pm and had scans and IVs and stuff, and will have prescriptions for painkillers and anti-nausea meds, and should be discharged soonish.

More details when I get home and am not trying to type long words on my phone.

kidney stones, now in more detail

So what happened is this:

Around 8:30 this morning, I noticed that I had a minor ache in my lower right back. I figured I'd probably strained something over night, so I took an ibuprofen, went in to work, and assumed it would be fine.

It was not fine. The ache got worse and worse until it hurt so bad I couldn't sit in a chair anymore. I lay down on the floor at the rental office, kept turning around trying to find a position that didn't feel like stabbing knives in my back and side, and generally hurt so much I couldn't think. Also I got chills, shakes, and cold sweats. So around 12:30pm, after a bit of hasty googling told me I probably had a kidney stone but appendicitis was also a possibility, I decided I should get medical attention instead of trying to stick it out at work.

New Hire was super nice and drove me to the hospital (we closed up for the day, because she is not ready to work on her own yet), and Mom Boss said it was okay for us to leave the office shut and she'd fix our hours on Monday. The pain ebbed a bit during the car ride -- down from a... nine-ish, maybe? to about a six or seven.

At the hospital, after the basic stats triage exam, the pain starting creeping back up toward eight and the shakes came back, so I took yet another ibuprofen. By the time I got in to a room and the doctor examined me, the pain had ebbed back down to about a two, but they put me on a morphine drip and schedule a CT scan with contrast, just in case it was appendicitis rather than a kidney stone.

The scan was pretty cool, and then it took another hour for the radiologist to read the scans and pass the info on to the attending doctor. Turns out it's a kidney stone -- not a large one, so it should pass on its own, but I have prescriptions for painkillers, anti-nausea meds (because the painkillers can make people nauseated), and a medicine that may or may not help kidney stones pass. I will get them filled tomorrow morning, and I have one pain pill and one anti-nausea pill for if the pain comes back tonight.

Mom may have panicked slightly when I texted her, and she and Dad drove up to help me out tonight and tomorrow -- they left before the hospital ruled out appendicitis, but kept driving once I updated them. They're checking into a motel right now, and will return with Chinese takeout.

I am supposed to have a follow-up appointment with a urologist in two or three days. I have the doctor's name and contact info, so I will make the call tomorrow and see if I need to schedule something or if the hospital did that for me.

And that is the story of how Dad's susceptibility to kidney stones turned out to have a genetic component, and he passed it on to me, the stinker. *wry* (I still love him anyway.)