In Which I Have Bad Night and a Fine Day
Mar. 17th, 2018 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSo yesterday after I got home from my lithotripsy, I was feeling some pain in my abdomen.
Over the course of the day, it blossomed. By dinner time I had a persistent ache in my back that I assumed was extreme soreness from the procedure and I was having increased nausea, which I chalked up to after effects of the sedative from the procedure. I could barely eat dinner, and by the evening I was feeling as bad as I'd felt since that bad day in February.
Every once in a while I could read a chapter from my Daredevil by Mark Waid omnibus, and K. and I managed a little bit of very brainless TV at dinner, but I mostly sat around and petted cats.
(It actually wasn't quite as bad as that day three weeks earlier, which I chalk up to my new opiate painkillers.)
Here's the funny thing: abdominal pain, back pain, and nausea are all side effects of kidney stones too. I was totally aware that could be going on too, but I figured the procedure was the most likely culprit.
My symptoms receded a bit by midnight, and so I went to bed with K. I was up and down all night, probably from the high amounts of water that I was drinking, and every time I could feel the pain in back.
Until some point when light was just barely whispering through the windows, then all the pain was gone.
I slept until 11am. No idea how much of that was good sleep, because I promised myself to keep my Fitbit off until at least Sunday, to prevent myself from feeling like I should get out and do stuff.
And when I got up at 11am, I still felt almost entirely fine.
So my analysis is that the in one way or another the kidney stone got moving due to the procedure on Friday, and the pain from it finally resolved in the middle of the night.
This suggests one of two things.
1.) The kidney stone got shattered by the procedure, and all that pain and nausea last night was it finally breaking apart in my ureter, and now the gravel is slowly sliding out and should be expelled in the next week or so. But it's not big enough to cause notable pain now, especially not as long as I'm taking my alpha blockers.
2.) The kidney stone wasn't much effected by the ESWL, but did move a bit, causing all the pain and nausea last night, and now it's lodged a little further down my ureter, stuck just like it was for the last three weeks, but not causing immediate problems, other than being a ticking time bomb.
Fun facts that I learned today: EWSL is actually more effective on a kidney stone in the kidney than in the ureter, because it's surrounded by liquid there. Thanks again, Golden Gate Urology doctor, who let this kidney stone grow to a too-large size by suggesting against using procedures on it a few years ago, and who also apparently made it harder to resolve.
Still, what I've read suggests that ESWL is 70-90% effective when in the upper ureter, which is where the stone apparently was, according to the last two urologists who looked at it. So, I should be hopeful, because the odds are with me. But, y'know that's around the same chance that Clinton had of winning the 2016 election, depending on which source you read.
[This Section: SQUICK ALERT]
So one of the things that they want you to do when you have a kidney stone is sieve your urine, so that you can pull out the kidney stone, and get it back to the hospital, and then they can analyze what it was made of.
The main purpose here is to warn you about what created it, so that you can change your diet. And, frankly, that's not of a lot of interest to me as long as we're talking about a once-in-40-year event. I'll surely be really unhappy if I have another kidney stone in twenty years, but probably less so than if I don't eat chocolate or meat for the less twenty year (since those are two of the major causes of the main sort of kidney stones).
But, still, I'm happy to give the hospital that info, particularly in case it's a weird sort of kidney stone.
And also having a sieve would help me verify when I'd actually passed something, resolving whether we are in situation #1 or #2.
The problem is, I didn't get my sieve at the procedure.
The nurse showed it to me and showed me a specimen container, and also some post-op instructions (which she went over). But then she put it somewhere, I think maybe behind my bed. And I never saw it again. Probably the problem was that my nurses changed out in the last hour or so of my procedure, during my post-op (so that my poor first nurse could finally get her lunch, at 12.30 or 1). And I was presumably groggy, so I didn't remember.
So it was home without a sieve.
Amazon to the rescue.
Who allegedly now takes in 44 cents out of every dollar spent on ecommerce. Which is crazy and dangerous.
But I was able to order sieves from them, and asked them to be sent to the Amazon Pickup at the ASUC story. So, for absolutely no shipping cost, I got a delivery that was supposed to be next day.
And that's why Amazon rules ecommerce. There's a time when I might have spent hours walking from drug store to drug store, looking for sieves, and might still have failed. Here it was one-stop shopping.
And today, today was good. I was feeling good this morning and then throughout the day.
After a late lunch (cf. 11am wakeup), I got word that my sieves had been delivered. So I went out for a couple of mile walk, to our UPS store to pick up a package, then to the ASUC store to pick up my sieves from the magic Amazon storage lockers.
And otherwise I had a pleasant day. A few more hours napping (I was apparently tuckered out by something), some actual reading, and some actual TV watching (Doctor Who and Defenders are currently in our queue).
No kidney stones have appeared yet, either spotted beforehand or sieved afterhand.
But from what I've read, the average time for symptoms to resolve after an ESWL is 8.1 days. So, happy birthday to me?
(But I'd hope sooner, because my stone wasn't really that ginormous.)
All I know is that the moment when a stone appears in a sieve, presuming, fingers crossed, that happens, will be one of immense relief, because I'll know the procedure was successful and I should be done with the hospital.
For now, I'm already tired of tagging journal entries, "health".
Over the course of the day, it blossomed. By dinner time I had a persistent ache in my back that I assumed was extreme soreness from the procedure and I was having increased nausea, which I chalked up to after effects of the sedative from the procedure. I could barely eat dinner, and by the evening I was feeling as bad as I'd felt since that bad day in February.
Every once in a while I could read a chapter from my Daredevil by Mark Waid omnibus, and K. and I managed a little bit of very brainless TV at dinner, but I mostly sat around and petted cats.
(It actually wasn't quite as bad as that day three weeks earlier, which I chalk up to my new opiate painkillers.)
Here's the funny thing: abdominal pain, back pain, and nausea are all side effects of kidney stones too. I was totally aware that could be going on too, but I figured the procedure was the most likely culprit.
My symptoms receded a bit by midnight, and so I went to bed with K. I was up and down all night, probably from the high amounts of water that I was drinking, and every time I could feel the pain in back.
Until some point when light was just barely whispering through the windows, then all the pain was gone.
I slept until 11am. No idea how much of that was good sleep, because I promised myself to keep my Fitbit off until at least Sunday, to prevent myself from feeling like I should get out and do stuff.
And when I got up at 11am, I still felt almost entirely fine.
So my analysis is that the in one way or another the kidney stone got moving due to the procedure on Friday, and the pain from it finally resolved in the middle of the night.
This suggests one of two things.
1.) The kidney stone got shattered by the procedure, and all that pain and nausea last night was it finally breaking apart in my ureter, and now the gravel is slowly sliding out and should be expelled in the next week or so. But it's not big enough to cause notable pain now, especially not as long as I'm taking my alpha blockers.
2.) The kidney stone wasn't much effected by the ESWL, but did move a bit, causing all the pain and nausea last night, and now it's lodged a little further down my ureter, stuck just like it was for the last three weeks, but not causing immediate problems, other than being a ticking time bomb.
Fun facts that I learned today: EWSL is actually more effective on a kidney stone in the kidney than in the ureter, because it's surrounded by liquid there. Thanks again, Golden Gate Urology doctor, who let this kidney stone grow to a too-large size by suggesting against using procedures on it a few years ago, and who also apparently made it harder to resolve.
Still, what I've read suggests that ESWL is 70-90% effective when in the upper ureter, which is where the stone apparently was, according to the last two urologists who looked at it. So, I should be hopeful, because the odds are with me. But, y'know that's around the same chance that Clinton had of winning the 2016 election, depending on which source you read.
[This Section: SQUICK ALERT]
So one of the things that they want you to do when you have a kidney stone is sieve your urine, so that you can pull out the kidney stone, and get it back to the hospital, and then they can analyze what it was made of.
The main purpose here is to warn you about what created it, so that you can change your diet. And, frankly, that's not of a lot of interest to me as long as we're talking about a once-in-40-year event. I'll surely be really unhappy if I have another kidney stone in twenty years, but probably less so than if I don't eat chocolate or meat for the less twenty year (since those are two of the major causes of the main sort of kidney stones).
But, still, I'm happy to give the hospital that info, particularly in case it's a weird sort of kidney stone.
And also having a sieve would help me verify when I'd actually passed something, resolving whether we are in situation #1 or #2.
The problem is, I didn't get my sieve at the procedure.
The nurse showed it to me and showed me a specimen container, and also some post-op instructions (which she went over). But then she put it somewhere, I think maybe behind my bed. And I never saw it again. Probably the problem was that my nurses changed out in the last hour or so of my procedure, during my post-op (so that my poor first nurse could finally get her lunch, at 12.30 or 1). And I was presumably groggy, so I didn't remember.
So it was home without a sieve.
Amazon to the rescue.
Who allegedly now takes in 44 cents out of every dollar spent on ecommerce. Which is crazy and dangerous.
But I was able to order sieves from them, and asked them to be sent to the Amazon Pickup at the ASUC story. So, for absolutely no shipping cost, I got a delivery that was supposed to be next day.
And that's why Amazon rules ecommerce. There's a time when I might have spent hours walking from drug store to drug store, looking for sieves, and might still have failed. Here it was one-stop shopping.
And today, today was good. I was feeling good this morning and then throughout the day.
After a late lunch (cf. 11am wakeup), I got word that my sieves had been delivered. So I went out for a couple of mile walk, to our UPS store to pick up a package, then to the ASUC store to pick up my sieves from the magic Amazon storage lockers.
And otherwise I had a pleasant day. A few more hours napping (I was apparently tuckered out by something), some actual reading, and some actual TV watching (Doctor Who and Defenders are currently in our queue).
No kidney stones have appeared yet, either spotted beforehand or sieved afterhand.
But from what I've read, the average time for symptoms to resolve after an ESWL is 8.1 days. So, happy birthday to me?
(But I'd hope sooner, because my stone wasn't really that ginormous.)
All I know is that the moment when a stone appears in a sieve, presuming, fingers crossed, that happens, will be one of immense relief, because I'll know the procedure was successful and I should be done with the hospital.
For now, I'm already tired of tagging journal entries, "health".
no subject
Date: 2018-03-19 02:12 pm (UTC)