Kidney Stone: A Short Story

I recalled my friends’ parents talking about relatives getting kidney stones all the time and how painful it would be for them, that some had to go to the hospital to get the stones surgically removed. I could never understand the hype about it. How painful could it be? Then again, I never had a kidney stone before, but after having one, I never wanted one again. It seemed like it happened a decade ago, but it was only three years back. It was evening; I had been laying on the couch all day in a row of pillows underneath my back and covered with blankets watching television when my mom came home from work. “How do you feel?” my mom asked with an apprehensive look. “Terrible.” I felt worse than a sick dog, sweat covered me and I shivered

I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to ask what the hell a catheter even was but couldn’t find the courage to do so. I looked towards my mother pleading with eyes for her to explain the situation to me, I didn’t like feeling so lost. My mom must have got the message because she immediately took control and gave the doctor the go-ahead to do the procedure.

Dr. Sarah sent in a group of nurses all dressed in the same colored scrubs with a gurney, strange tube like equipment, and they gave me a hospital gown to change into. They got me to relax and inserted the catheter, which hurt a lot, but barely compared to my back and stomach pain. They took me to a different hospital room that was darkly light and the doctor sat down at the portable computer, grabbed a probe that was connected to the computer and told me that I would need to lift up by gown so that she could put on the gel that was needed for the ultrasound. The gel was oddly warm and freaked me out.

For ten minutes Dr. Sarah moved the probe around in a hundred different directions until she stops where I initially expressed the pain’s