Kidney Stones!

I'm coming back from a combined few days in the hospital dealing with Kidney Stones. Just wanted to share my story, in case it has (or God forbid, will) happened to anyone else.

Woke up Monday Morning 5:30am in excruciating pain radiating front to back on my left lower abdomen. Since I am not a morning person and it was VERY early for me, all I could do was writh and ask myself, "WTF?" Having just finished my period, I went to the bathroom, thinking I was having either really bad cramps or really bad gas. Neither was the case and the pain would. Not. STOP.

Of course, I did what all sane adults do--I called my mom! My mom (also woken out of a deep sleep) confirmed that it wasn't appendicitis (appendix is on your right side, not your left), and asked me to call my Dr. Even though I have a PCP, since Surgery, I've treated Dr. Harrington (my WLS surgeon) as my PCP--I really trust him more, plus this is an abdomen pain, which is clearly in his domain, right? His service pages him and tells me that if he hasn't called back in 15 minutes to call them back.

I got through about 7.5 of those 15 minutes before I was like "eff this!" and caught a cab to the hospital. I was in the emergency room at 7am, sitting with my head to my knees trying to keep the pain down (btw, this is something I never could have done before surgery--my belly was too big to allow me to bend over that far!). Once they brought me back to the room, right away, everyone (nurses, doctors) thought I had a kidney stone. They did a CT scan and then an ultrasound and confirmed I had a 3mm kidney stone just outside my left kidney (in the ureter from the kidney to the bladder). They gave me some pain medication and a urine strainer and told me to follow up with a urologist. The only other thing of note that happened when I was in the ER was that when they gave me an IV of morphine, my blood pressure went down to 85/45--so they bagged me with a thing of saline to hydrate me.

I left the ER Monday afternoon around 2pm and went home. I had really bad pain Monday in the middle of the night, had a pretty good day Tuesday, and woke up with bad pain on Wednesday morning that stayed until about 3:30pm. At about 6pm, I called my mom again, telling her that I'd been in a lot of pain and was really nauseous (I threw up twice Monday morning). I hadn't had anything to eat on Wednesday, but was trying to keep drinking water. When I had to hang up the phone on my mom to throw up the three sips of water I'd just taken, she made me call my doctor again.

My Doctor admitted me into the hospital Wednesday night because he was concerned that I was becoming too dehydrated. I spent the night Wednesday and all day Thursday in the hospital, getting bags of Potassium Chloride and a little pain medication (although I was more nauseous than in pain at that point). My doctor discharged me yesterday evening--again with pain medication and a strainer to wait out the kidney stone. (Kidney stones can take up to a month to pass through your system!)

A couple of comments:
1) My doctor said that there is a known correlation between WLS and kidney stones due to the malabsorption of minerals in our bodies, which can cause buildups in our kidneys ("calculi") that are kidney stones. There are some surgical treatments for kidney stones, but they all have a slight risk of damaging my renal system (kidney/bladder/ureter/urethra), and I'd rather deal with the pain of passing the stone than a lifetime of urinary problems!

2) Our "normal" blood pressure range changes a lot with our weight loss. My "normal" BP used to be 120/70, but I never even got close to that in the hospital, which made me quite nervous that I was very dehydrated. My blood work came back ok, and it was my surgeon who suggested that my BP has probably lowered b/c of WLS. I plan on getting my BP checked a few times in the next few weeks so I can start to see what my new "normal" BP is. If you were on BP meds before, you probably already knew this, but if, like me, you never had a BP problem, I bet you didn't realize that your BP range still probably changed with the weight loss.

Anyway--I'm doing much better now! I'm hoping to rest this weekend and be back to 100% early next week.