My First Kidney Stone


We went to bed just after midnight, at the end of a long day where we’d bunched, swam, carried the children around and I’d dangled from a series of holds on the climbing wall. Both very tired, the last thing I did was change my alarm for some rowdier music for the morning, then fall asleep.

About 2am, I woke up in extreme pain. There was a fist sized lump of pain in my lower left back. My belly felt bloated and sore. And there was a stabbing pain in my groin, as though somebody was sticking a corkscrew up into my abdomen and twisting. I staggered out to the toilet, thinking it was something wrong with my gut, but produced nothing. I tried sitting on the sofa, sitting on the floor, standing, lying down, nothing helped. The last time I had something so bad was in 2009 when my back went into spasm and I couldn’t breathe. And this felt much worse.

Nauseous, I went back into the bedroom and then to our other toilet, where I tried and failed to be sick. I went out to look for a pair of shorts to wear, couldn’t fit them on, bumped into the furniture. All my crashing around woke my wife up. By now I was having a panic attack, unable to talk properly or describe the pain, weeping as I tried to talk to her.

I was intending to walk to Singapore General, as it’s not far from our estate, but luckily my wife insisted on booking me a taxi. I stumbled to the lift and sat downstairs, and then was quickly driven to A&E. Although the SGH campus is close, the route to A&E is so labyrinthine I might still have been walking there this morning.

Instead, about 3am I was trying to get registered. At SGH they screen you (a quick check of temperature and personal details) then triage, then treat. Now, my accent is hard enough for a Singaporean to understand at the best of times. When I’m fighting not to vomit over somebody and also bent over double with pain, trying to speak my ID number through gritted teeth was… challenging.

Soon I was on a gurney and then wheeled to an alcove, where I lay, wracked with pain. I thought 3am on a Monday would be a good time to visit the hospital, but it was still plenty busy. After an interminable time, somebody came over and put a shot of anaesthetic in my backside. The pain subsided slightly.

At 3am, there are a lot of medical students. Two of them were tasked with putting a needle in my hand. Three or four times they didn’t do this – my veins were too thin, or too crooked. In would go the needle, they’d fiddle trying to attach a stent, and then have to take it out. Eventually two experienced nurses came over, and did the same damn thing on the other hand, before finally giving up and putting it into my elbow, where it allowed them to get me on a drip and put some tramadol into me.

The pain subsided. Just until they took me for x rays, when again I was sobbing and swearing with pain, and still trying not to be sick. Somewhere along the way I had to give a urine sample – I managed about a quarter of an inch, almost unable to stand – and at some point after that, they came along with the diagnosis that it was probably a kidney stone.

More drugs, then I fell asleep for an hour or two until they woke me for a blood pressure reading.

I sent my wife, who’d been up worrying since 3am,the prognosis and she could at last relax a little. Just before the girls woke up. If you haven’t had a kidney stone, my symptoms – sudden, inexplicable pain in the lower back and groin – are a pretty classic example, so that is something to be proud of. I cancelled all my meetings for the day, tried and failed to be sick into a vomit bag, got more drugs pumped into me, fell asleep again and then woke up for a breakfast of Milo and white bread.

This may be the closest I get to appreciating the experience of giving birth. I was getting the same drugs my wife did, and the same diet. As there wasn’t much she could contribute, she took the girls to school, worked out then came to see me, as I came round from another tramadol-driven nap. I looked like this:

I wish I’d had her video me as well, because apparently I was a drooling idiot, slurring and baffled. But the pain had gone.

Or rather, a nurse would come and ask me if the pain was still bad, I’d tell them it had stopped hurting, and five minutes later boom I would be writhing in agony again and pleading for more painkillers. This cycle continued until midday, when I was dosed with three different painkillers and some anti-nausea drugs, and when I woke up from that, I was pain free and discharged an hour later.

So now I have some instructions for what to look out for – shivers, fever, blood in my urine – and a vast amount of pills. I’m trying to put up with a little bit of ache in my kidney now, saving the big hitters until I go to bed. (After all, having slept most of the day, if I try sleeping without a bump of tramadol, I might be awake until the morning…)


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