Trading pain for pain

Last year, I had the unbelievable luck to get a kidney stone.  It was awesome.

And by awesome, I mean something that made me pray for sweet death.

I’d never had one before, and it felt nothing at all like I was expecting it to.  I always thought it would be sort-of a “razor blades when you pee” kind of thing.  Wasn’t the case at all.

And for those of you who have never had a kidney stone, you always hear about how freaking horrible they are, now that I’ve had one I can honestly say that the only reason people say they’re so freaking horrible, is because they’re freaking horrible.

It feels like God is raping you in the back.

I don’t recommend them.  Unless you’re the kind of person who enjoys the experience of sitting in traffic, and suddenly being aware of a sound way off in the distance of someone screaming bloody murder, only to look in the rearview mirror and realize that the person screaming is you.

And just to add apocalypse to injury, my particular granule of satanic calcium decided it just didn’t quite want to pass into the cold oblivion of the outside world.  So it embedded itself in my ureter.

Which means they had to go get it.

I’ll spare you the horrifying details from this point on because it seems I still seem to think I have some semblance of dignity, but I will tell you that when I came out of surgery and the doctor showed me the demon spawn I’d just birthed by cesarean, I apparently flipped it off in my drugged haze.

Meeting with the urologist in a follow up later on, he gave me some suggestions to keep this from happening again.  One of his suggestions was to drink orange juice every morning.  Evidently there are citrins (that’s the word he used) in OJ that keep the calcium in the kidneys from collecting and forming stones.

That’s cool.  I like OJ.  Only one problem…

Citrus juice.  Ulcers.  Not a good combination.

Yes, orange juice makes me break out in canker sores like a 15 year old kid’s face the night before a prom.  So I’ve learned in order to avoid extreme pain, I have to do something… that causes extreme pain.

Awesome.

I still drink the OJ whenever I can – RAS sucks but kidney stones are WAY worse – I just make sure to rinse afterward.