Health

For most of the week of July 4th, I was on vacation. I didn’t do much of anything, I just relaxed and took it easy. I’ve recently been dating someone new (more to come on that soon), and we were able to spend a lot of quality time together. I went to bed on Sunday night relatively early; I wanted to get up bright and early on Monday so I could roll into work and spend a little time catching up.

Things didn’t quite pan out like that.

I woke up at 2am with indigestion. I had some pain in my GI tract, and needed to use the restroom. I got up, did my business, but felt like I wasn’t finished. Then I started burping. I wasn’t really worried until after thirty minutes had gone by and the burping didn’t show any signs of letting up. And I still felt like I had to use the bathroom.

My girlfriend, Jodi, is a nurse, so one of the perks with that relationship is free medical advice. I sent her a text message explaining my predicament and asking her to give me a call if she happened to wake up and see my text.

I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what the issue was. I doubted it was food poisoning, because I wasn’t vomiting. I also hadn’t eaten anything that would easily lend itself to food poisoning.

My diet for the previous day:

• Two doughnuts and a cold brew coffee
• Super-healthy salad, with chicken
• Ample Meal Replacement Shake

Breakfast
Doughnuts are not really known for their ability to cause food poisoning, and neither is coffee.
Odds of food poisoning – really low

Lunch
My salad might have had a chance of making me sick. I used a salad in a bag and simply added chicken that I cooked separately, sous-vide style. Pre-made salads have been in the news recently for making people sick, but the main culprit has been Romaine lettuce, which wasn’t in my salad. The other culprit might have been the chicken, but I cooked it long enough to know it was done.
Odds of food poisoning – low-to-medium

Dinner
The meal replacement shake arrives in powder form and is shelf stable for months. You just add water and drink it.
Odds of food poisoning – low

However my symptoms were completely inconsistent with food poisoning. With food poisoning, you vomit and have diarrhea in an attempt to rid your body of some type of toxin. They were more consistent with indigestion…with my body not liking what I ate.

Over the past few months I’ve been working hard to change my eating habits. I’ve been replacing one meal a day most days with a meal replacement shake. The shake I’m using, from Ample, is filled with a lot of really healthy ingredients, while having the benefit of filling me up and only being 600 calories. I noticed after drinking Ample consistently that my tastes began to change. Soda would taste different. Random foods (typically unhealthy foods) wouldn’t be as satisfying. When I’ve been tempted to stray from my diet and actually do get something unhealthy, I would often find it unsatisfying.

This was the case with the doughnuts I had for breakfast. I knew I shouldn’t have them, but if I had two (and a coffee) I could still fit everything into my caloric goals for the day. So I bought them and didn’t feel guilty. What I did feel after eating them, though, was a bunch of queasiness. I had basically eaten a sugar bomb, and what wasn’t already sugar was easily converted to sugar. I could feel my stomach complain after I ate it, but 30 minutes later I had forgotten about it and moved on with my day.

So, at 3am on Monday morning I was grasping at straws, trying to figure out what was going on. Out of everything I had had that day, the doughnuts at breakfast seemed like they might be the thing most likely to make my body complain.

So the burping continued, on and on, for hours. Around 5am, Jodi woke up and gave me a call. We theorized about what could be happening and I told her about my doughnut theory. Since the symptoms pointed to indigestion, I decided to drive to a drugstore and buy something to get rid of the gas. Once the gas was eliminated I could go to sleep.

I drove to a drugstore, bought some pills, and drove back. The directions said to take one or two, so I took one to see what effect it would have. Forty-five minutes later the gas had only decreased slightly, so I took another pill. 30 minutes after that, my stomach had calmed down enough for me to feel okay with going back to bed.

I realized that I needed to urinate, so I went into the bathroom. I was in for a surprise. My urine was super dark.

Well, super dark for me. I snapped this picture and sent it to Jodi. She was skeptical; she said it was dark but it was within the range of normal. My urine is typically an extremely light yellow, or clear. This was out of the ordinary for me. I was concerned, but not super concerned. I know that during times of distress, the body can produce a lot of waste products and sometimes your urine can be darker than normal. It had been a while since I had urinated, maybe something had happened in the interim.

Jodi advised me to drink some water and then urinate again in a half hour. It was sensible advice, so I followed it. Thirty minutes later, my urine was even darker. While trying very hard not to freak out, I had one more bottle of water, with the intention of trying to urinate again in another 30 minutes. If it was still dark, I was going to make an appointment to visit my doctor.

Then the pain started.

Now, this entire time I had been awake, I had had some pain off and on. There was pain in my abdomen and in my back. A little Google-fu revealed that it’s common for indigestion to cause this sort of pain. This pain, however, was new. It was primarily located in my back, and it was sharp.

Whenever you report your pain to a medical professional, they ask you what your pain level is on a scale from 1 – 10, with 10 being the maximum…the worst you’ve ever felt. My pain with the burping and abdominal/back pain had been about a 3 or a 4; annoying but not much more than that. This new pain in my back was about a 5 or a 6; definitely enough to get your attention and tell you that something was wrong.

So I fought through the pain for another half hour until my doctor’s office opened. I called them and told them I was in urgent pain and needed to be seen immediately. They looked at their schedule and promptly offered me a 1:45pm appointment.

As a result, I decided to go to Urgent Care. I got dressed and hopped in my car. It was around 7:45am by then, and a ton of people were trying to get to work, so the roads were crowded.

And EVERYONE was moving SUPER SLOW.

And with every minute my pain level was increasing. What had been a 5 was rapidly increasing to a 7. About five minutes into my drive to Urgent Care, I changed my mind and decided to visit the Emergency Room.

Ten misery-filled minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of the ER and rushed inside, bracing myself for the inevitable wait. To my great surprise, no one else was in there. I went to the admissions desk, they took my info, and after a moment called me back.

After a quick initial screening, I was taken back to a room. I texted Jodi to let her know what was going on and tried to get comfortable. I was still feeling pain, so I was short on patience. I felt a bit better when I paced around the room, so I paced while I answered the nurse’s initial questions.

Not too long after that, another nurse came in with a bag of saline and I wound up having to get into the bed so she could insert an IV. By this point I think they had decided that I had a kidney stone and were determined to treat me as though I had one. They told me that they wanted to give me Fentanyl.

America is currently in the midst of a huge opioid addiction epidemic, and powerful drugs like Fentanyl are leading the charge. Fentanyl is extremely powerful; it’s between 50 and 100 times more powerful than morphine. When they mentioned the Fentanyl I knew that they were taking this pretty seriously. It shocked me, to be honest. They clearly knew (or suspected) more than I did. You don’t just break out the Fentanyl for no reason.

The doctor came in a few minutes and said he thought I had a kidney stone. I was surprised; I’ve never had kidney stones. While I was growing up, my dad had a large number of them and I’ve tried to structure my diet in such a way that I am not at risk for them.

The next few hours were miserable. I had some imaging done, and gave a urine sample. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. The pain was excruciating. There were times where I was writhing on the bed in pain because I couldn’t just lay still. Another time the pain was so bad that I felt as though it was going to make me vomit.

Eventually, with the addition of some Valium I was able to fall asleep. I woke up when the doctor came back into the room and informed me that the imaging showed I had a kidney stone in my left kidney.

They discharged me, gave me several prescription meds, and sent me on my merry way with strict instructions not to drive. It was a larger stone, but it would probably pass on its own with no problem.

Over the next couple of days, it became clear that this was not correct. The ER referred me to a urologist, who wanted to see me the next day. I arrived at my appointment and immediately the doctor began trying to convince me to have surgery. He said that if I wanted to try to pass the stone, I could, but he felt like surgery was the best option.

I asked several questions and eventually decided to take the doctor’s advice and get the surgery.

The surgery is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, July 19th. I’m a little worried about the process of using anesthesia, but I’m overall a fairly healthy person and I should be fine.

There’s a 15% chance they won’t be able to perform the surgery, and I’ll have to live with a stent inside my urinary tract for two weeks before they try again. I’m really hoping that things go well.