#13 The Kidneys Are All Right

In April of 2011, near the end of my senior year of high school, I was pretty stoned.

Hah, just kidding, I wasn't. My kidneys, on the other hand, totally were.

You guessed it: I passed kidney stones.

I know what you're probably thinking: "kidney stones are for old men! How did a sprightly, young 18 year old girl come down with them?" Truthfully, I don't know. Probably by the same pot of gold that graced me, that same year, with a nasty bacterial infection and left me hospitalized in an isolation room for upwards of 5 days. But that's a story for a different time. Here's the story for now:

It all started one morning at school. I was sitting in math class minding my own business, when suddenly I started feeling a sharp, sharp pain in my abdomen. I assumed it may have been my "time of the month" and that I was just experiencing bad cramps. I got through the day and made it home in time for a driving lesson I'd scheduled. I was on the road with my instructor, and I had already explicitly told him that I was on my period ('cause like, fuck boundaries) when, à la most first dates I've been on, I barfed. My instructor was horrified, though he did manage to make a clever, albeit inappropriate joke that went something along the lines of, "now I'm really hoping you were right about those cramps." That's right, he was making a joke about my being pregnant. So, okay, we went home.

Now, despite the fact that I was 18 and about to graduate high school and go to college, I was still a teenage girl, so when my mom wisely suggested I cancel the big sleepover I had planned for that night, I disagreed. I didn't have a fever, so I was pretty sure this wasn't appendicitis, and I promised that I'd go to the ER if things got really bad. If that's not music to a mother's ears, I don't know what is.

The sleepover began (it was at my dad's house) and it was okay, despite the fact that I was in excruciating pain. Eventually I wound up secluded in this tiny T.V. room, writhing in agony while my friends continued the sleepover. In my house. Without me. It was a weird moment on all of our parts and we haven't really spoken of it since. The next morning, I demanded my father take me to the hospital. In a particularly stellar parenting moment, he begrudgingly said he'd take me, but made sure I felt really guilty about it because, I was clearly on my period and going to spend 12 hours in the hospital only to be prescribed with aspirin, I was just whining and he'd hate to say he told me so.

After about 5 hours in the hospital, and about a million "are you sure you're not pregnant?" conversations (my driving instructor would've felt right at home), I learned I had kidney stones. My dad shut his mouth. I was told that I was currently passing one, and I had two or three more stored up in the 'ole kidneys, but there was no way they'd pass anytime soon. I was given a ton of pain meds, and the reassuring promise that, "it's exactly the same amount of pain as childbirth."

I went home, I was on my painkillers, and life was pretty easy. Eventually the stone passed, but that's a really graphic story. I'll only share that the entire process involved me sitting on the toilet for about 2 hours, drugged out of my mind, trying to chug a gallon of water. It ended with me victoriously raising my hands above my head (an empty jug of water in one hand and a tiny stone in the other), and quite literally weeping with joy.

So, it kind of was like childbirth. Touché, doctors.

But then, the unthinkable happened. I STARTED PASSING ANOTHER STONE. It was horrible, and way more painful because my delicate insides were already torn apart by the first one. They put me on even more pain meds, so I was even more drugged up. Also,  I had a big performance that night for a play I'd written and had been working on all year, which I was clearly unfit to perform in, but I decided that the show must go on, in spite of everything. You can imagine how that went.

And that was it. I passed the two stones (because I'm a superhuman and I can pee rocks), I and currently have two more stored up. No one knows when they'll decide to pass, but I anxiously await their arrival.

This is what a kidney stone looks like.