No Strings Attached

So here it is. Finals week. Three gruelling tests were all that separated me from the glorious escape of summer. Ohio State was nice enough to schedule my three exams all on Wednesday (today) and Thursday of an exam week that went from Monday to Thursday. So I decided I'd go home for the long weekend so that I could focus on studying without having to worry about food or comfort so much. Ha. Comfort. Last Thursday the stone moved. Friday I was in a great deal of pain. Saturday was the same. So I decided if I was still in pain Sunday morning, the E.R. was probably in my future.

On Sunday I woke up around 7 in more pain than I have been for quite some time. Obviously, the stone couldn't wait one more week. So to the E.R. my dad and I went. A CT scan showed that the stone had indeed moved and was blocking my ureter. The urologist would have to go in and do what he accidentally did last time, only this time on purpose. But it was Sunday, and urologists take Sunday off. And it wasn't an emergency so I'd have to wait until around 5 p.m. on Monday to have the 5 minute procedure done.

I'd stay in the hospital overnight so that they could manage my pain. That night when the toridol they had given me wore off, they gave me more, only this time the pain never subsided. I went all night buzzing the nurse as soon as I was allowed another dosage of morphine. It's not as though I wasn't up already though, my poor roommate was having trouble sleeping so he watched TV ALL night. The volume on these TVs only had two settings: off and loud. So I would have been up anyway. Being in pain all night was awful, but it did make me a priority for the urologist who had me brought down to surgery around 7 in the morning.

It turns out the stone had completely lodged itself into my ureter, so they were going to go up after it again. Just like last time it fell back into the kidney, but the urologist's bendy laser tool was able to get it in range this time. I imagine it was similar to the Death Star being destroyed in Star Wars. That's right, the stone has been destroyed. Which means: I don't have to have surgery to remove it! Hooray!

Going in to the surgery, the plan was to push the stone back into the kidney if they couldn't get it and put a stent in. This I was not so excited about. When I was being prepped for surgery, one of the doctors was going over what the plan was with me. He mentioned the stent, and I stopped him and said, "The stent is not to have any strings on it. I don't want to be able to remove it myself." His response: "Did you not like that last time?" The understatement of the century.

When I went into the operating room, the urologist came over, and I told him, "This is not to be a remove-it-yourself stent." He said that he understood, and it would not be. Then the anesthesiologist went to put the mask on me. Before he did, I stopped him and announced to the entire room, "Everybody, the stent is to have no strings attached!" Most in the room chuckled and agreed.

The next thing I know, the urologist is waking me up and tells me they got the stone. Blew it into oblivion. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.

It is amazing, though, how unprepared you are for final exams when you spend the entire weekend prior to them in the hospital. My calculus exam was this morning. I think it went OK. Not great, but OK. I have two more tomorrow. And then I'm done. At 6 p.m. tomorrow I should be in the car pulling out of the parking lot of 404 West 12th Avenue in Columbus and I never have to come back. I'll be on my way home - with a quick stop at Arby's of course.

-IW