Friday, February 3, 2012

worse pain than labor?!

aren't my new bracelets pretty?!



you see, around 9 pm on Wednesday night I got this throbbing pain in the right side of my back. it came out of nowhere. bizarre, right? my back had been sore, so i figured it was just a muscle thing. i tried to relax and deal with it, but around 11 it had just gotten worse. we called the midwife and she suggested tylenol and thought it could be back spasms the way i was describing the pain. lovely, no tylenol in the house and not a single store open. so i decided to be stubborn and deal with it. bad idea - i only lasted about two and a half more hours before i had to call back the midwife since the pain kept making me throw up (goodbye every ounce of fluid, hello dehydration). she told me the best thing to do was to come in...so at 2:30 my father in law drove us the hour to the hospital (bad roads = better drive with snow tires...we don't have snow tires). what a good father-in-law because not only did he bring us at 2:30 in the morning, he then went and worked a 12 hour shift at 7 am.

anyways, i stumbled into the ER doubled over because the pain was so bad and they quickly brought me up to the labor & delivery floor. i laid down and in walks the midwife, an ob doc, my nurse and a student (UVM is a teaching hospital - students everywhere!). they took one look at me and all had the same thought: kidney stone. it took about a half an hour to get paperwork through (it felt like an eternity), but they finally gave me pain meds. oooooh the joy of pain meds. it made me just sleepy enough to be able to manage the pain. and then they gave me my magic button that i could press every six minutes. every six minutes i pressed it and in came the pain meds. best. invention. ever.

sometime in the morning they took me for an ultrasound to look for the stone. they couldn't find it. strange. they said my kidney was inflamed and there were other signs consistent with a stone, so that's what they're going with. i kept hitting my magic button every six minutes until all of a sudden around 2:30 i stopped needing to use it. it was like someone had hit the off switch on the pain! it was crazy. i finally saw a doctor around five and he determined that the stone probably dissolved and that i could go home.

so i'm home now. the pain has returned, but to a lesser degree. the midwife thinks that it could be part of the stone still in there and that the kidney is still inflamed so she's giving me some narcotics for the pain. victory.  pain management at home and not in a hospital! so as long as i keep up my fluids and take my drugs, i should be all set. though, they'll want to see me if it doesn't get better...hopefully this isn't the case!

and don't worry, baby jacob is just fine in there. we heard his heartbeat a couple times and it's beating at the same rate it has been. and, since i was in the hospital, he received all the fluids he could have ever wanted! the nurses reassured us that this wouldn't affect him at all and that kidney stones are fairly common during pregnancy. the doctor even told us that they are even more common in the right kidney due to all the crazy things going on in the body. go figure!


i must say, that was possibly the worst pain i've ever been in in my entire life. they do say having a kidney stone is worse than having a kid. i guess my body just wanted to practice the whole pain thing for a little while...

1 comment:

  1. Oh man! I'm so sorry to hear that you had to go through this! Ugh! When I first started reading I was having flashbacks to my emergency appendectomy and am REALLY glad you didn't have to have that. So glad you are able to manage the pain and that Baby Jacob is ok! xoxo

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