If, like me, you had never bothered to learn anything about kidney stones… other than the fact that they are extremely painful… here is something interesting about them. I always imagined that the real pain would come at the end of the stone’s ride through your lower urinary tract… you know… when it tried to squeeze its way out through that last little bit… well, I mean, not little… exactly… but let’s not worry about that for now…

It turns out that the last part is not so bad… or so I was told by real medical professionals, because I haven’t reached that point yet… no, the bad part is what bent me over, gasping for breath last night, pain so bad that I felt like I was going to pass out and I actually vomited until I couldn’t anymore. Pain that made me immediately realize that I had to go to the emergency room… and not put it off for a few days or a week, like I would normally have done.

The painful part is when the stone… 3 mm X 4 mm, more or less, in my case… gets lodged in narrow parts of your plumbing. I really thought my kidney had burst, or something near it… hey, I am not a doctor… but the pain was a big, burning ball just slightly behind the mid-line of my lower back.

Now I am on pain meds… and that is my excuse for sharing all this with you… that and the fact that I share all of my life with you, the good, the bad… and this…