The morphine is wearing off and the pain is coming back and I've been in this bed for 13 hours now waiting for a CAT scan and I keep throwing up the tracer fluid the doctors have been forcing me to drink and they keep making me drink more of it and the tearing pain in my side is so bad I can't even sit still.
Strenuous moments of pain and confusion packed in between morphine injections leading to induced hallucinations, babbling and slipping in and out of consciousness. Easiest way to ease the pain: dose the patient on so much morphine they pass out.
Thirteen hours in this bed and all I need is a CAT scan. Started at 6 a.m. Woke up, got out of bed, stumbled downstairs and vomited. Not just another day in the life. Can't tell if my appendix is going to burst or if it is heartburn. Maybe I'm a bit drunk still, and I'm making this all up.
It really hurts too much to tell where the pain is coming from. Flag a cab quickly, get to the E.R. Give them my medical info, stumble through the two big swinging doors, lie in the plastic-lined bed and wait for the better part of the day.
In the end it was a kidney stone. Nothing major, but it hurt like hell. Not the best way to start a weekend, but it could have been worse.
Garret Kennedy is a senior Anthropology major from Wayne, Pa.
A couple days later, the pain started again. Not as bad as the first time, but bad enough to have me grabbing my side all day. This was probably the most disconcerting moment of the whole ordeal, the notion that this was not just some one time incident, but maybe something I'd have to watch out for time and again
I'm 21 years old, healthy in all regards -- a strapping young man, or something like that. And here I am, altering my diet and consuming x number of glasses of water a day to ward off any further attacks of calcified debris in my body.
I've had my share of random injuries and then some. Dislocated finger, broken ankle, wrist, teeth, concussions. The list of injuries can go on.
But there's something different about having something start internally. This happened out of nowhere and wasn't really predicated by any action of my own. It was not something under my control, it was not something that I could have predicted. It was not the result of an outside force, like some miscellaneous sports injury.
It was something within my body acting up against me. It was an invisible part of myself acting out unpredictably. I couldn't even blame this on myself --there's no direct correlation to one of my stupid acts.
Really, it's not the kidney stone itself that bothers me anymore. It's the sudden jolt of mortality. Swiftly and without warning the stupid notion of adolescent invulnerability is knocked around like some rag-doll stuck in between the multiple heads of Cerberus. I mean, kidney stones are those things that old men, and some feeble middle aged men, get. Not the youth; we're invincible, impervious to the ravages of bodily failure, disease and other associated forms of pain.
Or at least that's a very easy view to take, especially at this age where we're looking ahead at the not-so-distant future to forget how important one's health. I know it's something I've taken for granted the majority of my life, with the constant "it could never happen to me" mentality.
In the long run, a kidney stone is a pretty menial thing. It hurts like hell, but there's no real lasting damage. It's no life threatening disease. I realize how insignificant a kidney stone is in the long run, but I guess this is why it seems so significant. It isn't really a big deal, but there are plenty of big deal things that can pass by without notice. Things like cancer and other health issues that can appear without notice and do damage before their presence is even apparent.
So I suppose that it's in this vein of thought that I find this kidney stone to be somewhat meaningful for me. The stone's kind of like a little marker that says, "you're OK now, but you might not always be. You're not invincible, you're life span's not infinite. So take a minute to enjoy it all, but don't take it all for granted, because you never know when it might be something a little more serious than a little stone."
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