Coming To An End & Never Ending...

As of Monday, February 26, two things have happened :

1) If the Railroad Retirement Board is to be believed, my claim for Disability "...will be made within the two weeks..." - so even though they tell me every month "you'll hear next month", this time I was promised, apparently directly from my "Case Examiner" - so....we'll see.

2) I have been trying to pass a HUGE kidney stone for the past 100+ hours...

There are several stages to passing a kidney stone:

The first indication is usually a urinary tract infection, which shows itself as sudden, then a constant dull back pain on one side of the back (whichever kidney is making the stone, in this case the left kidney), nausea, and dark, cloudy urine. The "infection" usually passes within 24 hours (at least it always does for me).

The second is the pain as the stone leaves the kidney and travels down the ureter, the tube that connects the kidney to the bladder. At this point, I can feel exactly where a stone is on this journey.

Once the stone reaches the bladder the pain usually subsides for a while - anywhere from a day to weeks.

Once the stone decides to leave the bladder, the third part of the adventure begins. The stone (comparatively, it's like a softball trying to fit into a typical house drainpipe) usually makes a quick exit from the body by using the force of the urine behind it to shoot from the penis like a bullet.

Well, as of today, my bullet has been stuck in my chamber for four full days now.

Thankfully, I am still urinating (when I stop making urine, that means my kidneys are shutting down, again, and sepsis is possible, which would then put me back into the hospital), but the pee is hard to get started (though the pressure builds to intolerable forces), and I can usually just get a weak stream, which takes a while to let pass to reduce the pressure behind the stone, and I try not to strain, but sometimes I push like I'm in labor (can it really not be the same thing?), and I usually wind up on the verge of passing out.

I am drinking like a fish (again, I DO NOT want to stop peeing - that's BAD!), but 4 days and counting and still no movement.

"That's horrible!" you may say (go ahead, you can, because it is), but the worst part is that until I am approved for Disability I have no Medical Insurance, which means that unless I am approved in the next two weeks and have to be hospitalized, I'm totally screwed.

So, the past 100 or so hours have NOT been kind to me.
("as if any of the other 'past 96,000' hours have been?!")

RobMac