Traverse City Record-Eagle

Marta Hepler Drahos

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September 5, 2011

Marta Hepler Drahos: A stone's throw away

Marta Hepler Drahos, Staff writer ----

I’m typing at my desk when I feel a familiar twinge in my side. I hope it’s just that my pants are too tight and loosen the waistband.

As the afternoon wears on, the twinge becomes a throb. By evening the throb is an all-consuming pain nothing can relieve. Yup, a kidney stone.

It’s too late to go to the doctor, too late for urgent care. I drink a half-gallon of water and take hot showers, partly to open up the spaghetti-like passage to the bladder in the hope that the stone will pass, and partly because now I have chills and can’t get warm. By midnight I’m in the emergency room, where an X-ray confirms the stone and a powerful medication relieves the pain.

I go to bed and in the morning it’s as if nothing ever happened. I can’t believe my luck. Reassured that the stone has passed, I cancel my appointment with the urologist and am told to call if anything changes. Weeks go by without a twinge, then months.

Six months later, after a jarring flight home from Virginia to visit my sister, there’s blood in my urine. I go to the doctor, who orders a CT scan. A few days later the office calls with the results. Only the assistant won’t deliver them, saying the doctor wants to talk with me herself. She’s currently with a patient but will call me soon.

Immediately I fear the worst: They’ve found a tumor. I wait and try to work, but it’s almost the end of the day and, on top of that, it’s Friday. If I don’t hear from the doctor soon, I’ll have to go all weekend without knowing.

At 5, I meet my friends for dinner, but my heart isn’t into it. I call the doctor back for the second time. When I finally reach her, she apologizes for the alarm and says they’ve found not a tumor but a kidney stone. The same stone from six months before. Only now it’s moved. BACKWARD.

I schedule an appointment with the urologist, but the soonest they can see me is in two months. Long before then, the stone kicks into high gear, alternating between a dull throb and unbearable pain. The doctor calls in a prescription for a painkiller, but the list of serious side effects is as long as my arm. I settle for ibuprofen and beg for my appointment to be moved up.

A few weeks before, the pain suddenly stops. I have a new CT scan as ordered and am surprised when the urologist says the stone is still there. It’s at a bottleneck now and is too big to pass. He schedules lithotripsy.

The morning of surgery, I get up at 5:30 and ride in silence to the surgery center. I haven’t felt so much as a twinge in weeks, but I know the stone can’t stay where it is indefinitely. I hand over the abdomen X-rays from the day before and am banded and gowned and prepped. Just before they wheel me down the hall, the doctor pops in.

“Are you sure it hasn’t passed?” I joke weakly.

“That’s the thing,” he replies. “I can’t see it on the X-ray.”

He proceeds as if for surgery but does an ultrasound first. Sure enough, no stone. Apparently it has dissolved and passed in fragments too small to notice.

As I walk out of the surgery room I was wheeled into 15 minutes earlier, the doctors and nurses and techs I’d passed look startled.

“I’m the miracle patient,” I say. And they laugh.

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