"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
The nurse at my urologist's office called the other day to say that a test I had came back with abnormal results. There was too much calcium & sodium. They both can cause more kidney stones (which I don't want). She called in a prescription for a medication, I have to have blood drawn in a week, decrease salt in my diet, see how the blood test comes out & then we will redo the original test in about a month. The excess calcium has nothing to do with what I eat or supplements I take. It's a metabolic problem.
Sounds simple & straightforward, right? True, until I started googling the medication & the blood test I'm having in a week. I keep promising myself I'm going to stop doing that, but I just can't seem to stop myself. I am not a doctor even if I know how to google "parathyroid". All it gets me is scared.
I never knew I had a kidney stone until I was hospitalized for my first surgery in August, 2013. That's the surgery that removed the cancer from my body. It's also the surgery & hospitalization for which I had no insurance. I paid the surgeon 1/2 of her fee ahead of time, paid the anesthesiologist in full & gave the hospital a deposit that would cover the predicted 4-7 day stay. I've never seen money disappear so fast in my life. I ended up being in the hospital 17 days cause of multiple complications. (This is how I ended up with a $150,000 hospital bill which they "discounted" to $60,000. More about that in a later post) One of those complications was the kidney stone that was accidentally discovered during an x-ray looking for something else. It was causing me no pain. I didn't know I had it. However, it was situated where it was blocking my kidney. Left untreated it would have destroyed my kidney. They tried several things that didn't get rid of the stone. The result was that when I was finally discharged from the hospital, in addition to a brand new ileostomy, I left with a tube in my back that was... (excuse the icky factor)...draining urine directly from my kidney into a collection bag attached to my leg. I had to cart that damn kidney tube around with me for 4 months. It delayed my chemotherapy by 2 months. My oncologist actually told me "We don't give chemotherapy to sick people". (I guess now I understand that chemo lowers your resistance to infection & that tube was a straight conduit for germs)
As an aside, I will now mention that between the tube in my back & the ileostomy (which I had for 8 months) getting dressed was a challenge. This was especially true the 24 hours I also had to wear a Holter monitor for a heart test. I was wearing the baggiest clothes I could find.
I think I hated that tube more than anything else. Any pressure on it hurt & it had bandages on it that had to be changed several times a week. When the stone was finally destroyed & the tube removed, I thought that would be the happiest day of my life. No one told me that the hole had to close on its own over a week or so. Icky factor warning. While the hole closed, I had to wear really THICK bandages on my back. The bandages hardly lasted an hour. The humiliation was unbelievable. Eight months later I was told that part of the tube broke off in my kidney during the removal procedure. I am not happy about that. I've been assured that it is not dangerous. Hmmmm.... I hope not.
Remind me of this wrinkle the next time I say most of this trouble is in my rear view window.
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