Lost time?

I've been pretty much away from the computer, and from most of my "regular" life for the last 10 days or so. My radiation treatments seemed to have finally caught up with me, and a great deal of distress was occurring "in the neighborhood"! At the urging of Cheryl, I finally gave in and went to to see the oncologist. This was last Thursday, and I pretty much needed Cheryl to lean on to get there! Very severe discomfort. He asked lots of questions, looked quite concerned, and after deciding it was not radiation side effects, he sent me over to the Emergency Department! They kept me for about 4 hours --- but with no real diagnosis, they sent me to the Cardiology Department for a Holter monitor - a sort of 24 hour EKG - and from there to home. I successfully fended off Cheryl's urgings that I go back to Emergency, call my regular doctor, or SOMETHING, for most of the weekend, (the Vicodin from the emergency room doctor was some help) finally giving up and calling my regular doctor's emergency # around 3AM on Monday morning. He answered himself, and told me to come into the office in the morning - no appointment necessary.

Just a quick note that I love Dr. Sirotenko. He is very good at sorting out symptoms, and getting to the heart of the matter.

Within about 3 minutes he checked my urine for blood, and declared that I had a kidney stone. A sonogram was scheduled for Wednesday (about 48 hours away) , but Cheryl went around channels, and had me at the "look inside people and see what we can find" place getting looked at within a couple of hours!

Sure enough - a nice kidney stone with it's very painful passage process was what had been laying me low, including actually passing out a few times, for the past several days. They declared that the stone had already done most of it's dastardly stuff, and should be a thing of the past relatively soon.

My mental image of a nice little smooth river stone sort of thing was dispelled by the Internet (see one image I found above). I am still quite uncomfortable and still get waves of the peristalsis process that my body uses to try to push it on into the bladder and out of the way, but I'm certainly better than I was a week ago! The treatment is lots of liquids, time, and Vicodin!

It sure would be nice if we could get diseases one at a time! If I had walked into the Emergency Department with a severe pain in my kidney area radiating around to the groin, but hadn't been sent there by the Oncology folks, they probably would have figured it out in no time at all!

If I get a picture of my little nemisis, I'll post it!