Thursday, November 10, 2011

calcul renal



Kidney Stones...

...make me cry

around four am last friday i was half awoken from a vivid dream and stumbled to the bathroom with what i thought was a full bladder. i came back to bed, assuming i would sleep. i found however that my bladder seemed full again. only beginning to really wake up now i headed back to the bathroom. however, my bladder was indeed empty, but i did indeed still have the very urgent sensation of needing to pee. i was now fully awake and a little bit disturbed at not being able to find any relief.

the sensation persisted and empty bladdered i visited the bathroom countless times, until something new happened. this something was a little ache in my back. it was noticeably on the left and became painful enough quickly enough to distract me from the intense lack of urination irritation. it was probably almost five am at this point and ash had been searching our medical coverage online to find out if they could hook us up with a clinic. he was having no success and i was on the floor crying so he made the decision despite the early hour to call our afore mentioned friend prema.

from my position on the floor i vetoed the ambulance that was being spoken of. unfortunately that just left us with bikes. prema headed our way on her bike and we began a very very slow shuffle down our stone, mud, potholed alley. prema got to us quickly and brought a tuk tuk with her (the above picture was taken during the tuk tuk ride to the clinic). prema has been here for a number of years and had a few sick friends during that time so was able to take us straight to a 24hour clinic and is fluent in khmer so was a great help with the doctor and other health peoples. the doctor met us outside and brought us into a room immediately- no registration, no intake, no administration, just a person in pain who needs to be taken care of. he asked me a few brief questions, starting with anglais ou francais? we told him english. the next couple of questions were about the pain, he felt my stomach, felt my back, turned on a machine and did an ultrasound on my stomach and back. while doing this he asked my name and age and typed it into the machine. that was all of the personal information that was ever asked for. 

he showed us the kidney stones in the picture, said that i have a few on the go, to drink lots of water and jump up and down. then he left and another guy came in and gave me two shots in the butt cheek. 

at this point the pain was pretty unbearable and i was being pretty dramatic. it really was beyond my control though. in the 10 minutes between the shot and the painkillers kicking in the ridiculousness of the pain peeked. and then suddenly it was gone and life was great. life was amazing. i have no idea what the drugs were but i liked them. 

we got my prescriptions filled right there in the clinic by an ancient woman who was slowly opening the pharmacy now that it was after seven am. i walked out with four brightly coloured sets of pills and no idea what any of them did or directions on how to take them. im not a big pill user on the average day so i was a little bit wary of the collection i now had in my possession. i wanted to call my mom and give her the drug names and then call our good friend mari (the pharmacist, and overall health care supervisor since i was an infant) to confirm the usefulness of the pills. my mom however answered neither her cell phone nor her home phone so i decided to go straight to the source myself. i found the phone number for the vernon london drugs pharmacy online and called them on skype. at this point some cosmic force had decided that i had endured my sufferings and without even asking for her directly i was talking to mari with three minutes. she confirmed the meds, some easily and some after some research. i had been given an antibiotic, a pain killer, a something for acute spasm pain, and a diuretic. apparently all standard for kidney stone treatment. she told me which ones to take with food, which ones to take with lots of water, and i finally felt not only the physical but also the emotional relief that had been eluding me since four am. 

i took the day off of work, luckily i have coworkers who are cambodian and are built to handle anything so they just absorbed my classes into theirs. i spent the day sleeping, drinking water, taking pills and peeing. nothing seemed to change but the pain didn't reappear until about four-thirty the next morning. ash woke up with me and i think fearing that i would slip in to the world of extreme pain again turned the music on loud and got a few bottles of water and we had an early morning dance party in the living room to jump out the stones. and it worked! 

a couple of hours later, after talking to my mom on skype and getting to compare stories (she also had kidney stones a few years ago) i "passed" my first kidney stone! that one i just let be, but the next one, on my mom's advice i kept as a souvenir :) 



5 comments:

Kelly said...

aww em i hope you are feeling better! i had kidney stones a few months ago too and they were absolutely terrible!

Lorna said...

Wowzers! That is one brutal looking stone!

Lorna said...

That was me, mum.

Rushdy said...

Wow.. Must have been a tough day! Glad you are safe and sound!

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