At Least I Can Write About This Authentically

Yesterday was the last day of finals.  It also happens to be the day I woke up to intense agony.  No, not the I've-been-studying-myself-to-death pain, but the pain of my body being on fire (especially by my bladder and kidneys), my stomach roiling with nausea, and an acute stabbing feeling in the right side of the back.

This was about six thirty in the morning.  My mom handed me two ibuprofen, which I puked up about fifteen minutes later.  And continued to puke, at fifteen-minute intervals.  The sad thing was that it felt good to upchuck, because then I wasn't feeling the pain in my back.  My mom thought it was a kidney infection and my dad thought it was a stone, but we'd have to take me to the doc either way.

Luckily for me, I got to wait three and a half hours to be taken anywhere.  My dad had to be at home because some guy was coming to fix our broken garage door, and my mom had to go to first period of class and arrange for a sub for the rest of the day.  On a scale of one to ten, I started at a pain level of eight.  It went up by one number every hour.  The only thing that helped at all was to pace around the house between throwing up. It was all I could do to not scream from the pain, and/or throttle my dad for not driving me to the flipping hospital already.

Finally, my mom and I went to the Instacare place in Provo.  On the TV was Tinkerbell, Secret of the Wings.  Watching that helped a little.  When the doctor got in, he asked if I wanted my mom to be there for some 'invasive questions' he was going to ask me.  He really should've been more blunt, because I was in immense pain and not reading into things.  I thought he was going to ask about how many times a day I use the restroom.  Instead he was asking 'might you be pregnant' and other such nonsense.  'Are you sure?' he asked twice.  Seriously, I think I would know if I was pregnant.  Then he made a joke about how we were celebrating the only women to get pregnant without doing 'it' in all of history.  It took me about two minutes to figure out through the pain that he meant Mary.  Seriously, I was dying here, and he was cracking jokes?  I didn't like this doctor.

Finally he left, and a nurse came in with a shot for pain meds.  I'd thrown up three times in the hospital room since I'd gotten in, so there was no way I'd be able to keep any pills down.  The nurse told me it would take about half an hour to kick in.  That was the longest half-hour of my life.  The doc told us it was either an infection or a stone, he needed me to go to the radiology place and get scanned.  By the time we got to the radiology section of the hospital, I was downright cheerful.

I was no longer in pain.  That was all I'd wanted in the first place.  I nearly fell asleep at the radiology check-in place.  I almost fell asleep when I had to lay down on the bed-thing that they put you on to run you through the UV scanner.

It turned out to be a kidney stone, 2 millimeters large.  I was like, 'What?  I thought only older people got kidney stones.'  I was wrong.  Anyways, my kidney stone was half the size of a pencil eraser, and it was causing me so much pain?  Lame.  I got a nausea med prescription, and pain meds, and I was good to go.  We picked up Jack Frost from Redbox and got me a gigantic Slurpee to help pass the stone.  I caught a look at myself in the mirror at the store.  I looked pretty good for being in my PJs and having retched my heart out earlier.

All I need is to pass the stupid stone, and I'll be pain-free again.  The only final I missed was for Creative Writing, which I'm kind of mad about.  All I would've been doing was reading part of my ten-page project and eating a bunch of awesome sweets.  I submitted my project through e-mail.

*Sigh*  I'm coming off the pain meds I took this morning, and I'm not feeling any pain, so maybe I have passed it now.  In any case, at least now I can give one of my characters a kidney stone and write about it effectively.  Please, friends, drink lots of liquids and if you feel the pain I've just mentioned, get yourself to Instacare, preferably without waiting hours.