Sunday: Cassidy has odd abdominal pain. It’s on the left so I’m not too worried. Give her medicine, assume it’s period pain, continue on with day. Then she pees blood and I’m like yeah, to Urgent Care we go! The doctor we get is kind of a tool and doesn’t really listen to anything I say and blows it off as dehydration even though I told her SEVERAL TIMES that I’ve been hospitalized for dehydration more than once and this was NOT dehydration pee, it was BLOODY urine. They take urine… and don’t test for blood. Tells us that since her pain is only a 2/10 to go home, take some over the counter pain pain meds and see how it goes.
Monday: Cassidy is fine, I am fine, Ben is fine. EVERYBODY IS FINE. Well, not totally true. Cassidy is sunburned because she went to band camp and was in the sun for 10 hours straight. I spread an entire branch of aloe on her over the course of the evening.
Tuesday: I’d been at work for three hours when Cassidy calls me frantic and in tears and YOU NEED TO COME GET ME RIGHT NOW I AM IN SO MUCH PAIN IT’S A NINE OUT OF TEN, MOM! COME NOW!. I get to the school. She’s down to a 6/10 but she’d thrown up right before I got there.
We go to back to Urgent Care but Cassidy’s pain is only about a 2/10 at this point. We get a doctor that KICKS ASS. She’s not going to let us leave without some kind of diagnosis. She gets a urine sample right away and collects some blood then has us sit in the waiting room to wait for results. 10 minutes later Cassidy is hunched over in pain and throwing up with 7/10 pain.
Doctor calls us back into an exam room and tells us that since Cassidy is having this random pain and nausea she just wants us to go upstairs for a CT scan and an ultrasound while we wait for blood and urine results. Cassidy has the CT scan, we go right next door and they prep her for the ultrasound but just as the tech starts to check her kidney we get a knock on the door and the nurse says don’t bother ultrasounding the kidneys, just check for ovarian cysts. I’m not sure if this means they already found NOTHING in the kidney or SOMETHING in the kidney.
Head back to Urgent Care and the doctor says, “SURPRISE! You still have blood in your urine and the CT scan shows that you have two kidney stones! One is traveling (all the pain) and one is still in the kidney.” She made us an immediate appointment to see the Urologist so back upstairs we went for that appointment. Of course, by that time Cassidy had NO pain so he made her do an X-Ray to make sure that the stone didn’t pass after all the ultrasound prep water was evacuated. Nope, it was still there!
The doctor explains that the stone is large enough that it qualifies for laser lithotripsy OR we can wait for it to pass on it’s own. When he told Cassidy that could take 2 days to 2 weeks, she immediately said THAT LASER THING PLEASE! So he sent her home with a funnel she had to use every time she peed just in case it came out before her surgery on Thursday.
Six hours after we originally got to Urgent Care, we were on our way home. FINALLY.
Then the pain came back. So did the vomiting. I tried to give her the Vicodin and anti-nausea meds but she’d just throw them back up as soon as she took them. EVERYTHING came back up. The pain got to a 9/10 so I loaded her back up and we headed to the ER. We got there at midnight.
Wednesday: At the ER at Camino Hospital we got another KICK ASS doctor after no wait at all. She threw up on the way there in my car (I had taken a barf bag with me when we left Urgent Care, thank goodness). Then again in the waiting room. Then again when trying to change into her gown. They got her hooked up to an IV quickly and pushed an entire bag of fluids, some better anti-nausea medication and morphine into her in record time. They also gave her another drug that is supposed to help keep the ureters open so that things can flow more easily. I’m thinking this is what got us through the next two days.
We got home at 3:30AM and she slept for most of the rest of the day. At 11:00PM she ate dinner. Than at 11:30PM she ate again. Then at midnight she ate again. She and Ben stayed up pretty late watching movies and talking. I was exhausted so I went to bed.
Thursday: She slept till 11:59AM when I woke her up to take her last drink of water before surgery. She went right back to sleep till 2:15PM when we left for her surgery check in.
Her surgery was supposed to start at 4:15PM but they were running behind so it didn’t start till well after 5:00PM. The surgery went REALLY well. They were able to laser both the moving stone as well as the one that was in her kidney. She now has a stint that runs from her kidney all the way down her ureter to her bladder than has a string attached that come out her urethera. She has to pull that out on Tuesday morning which is also her first day of school! We tried to get video of her when she was still on the happy drugs from surgery but she just kept saying she had to pee and PLEASE FEED ME I AM SO HUNGRY OMG.
Friday: She slept a lot of the day but still had some pain and a lot of burning during urination. Because she’s on Norco now which is a REALLY strong drug, Ben and I have been in charge of giving her all her medicine so one of us has been with her pretty much non-stop since Tuesday. I even have a shared a google doc with him that I update whenever she gets any medication because TECHNOLOGY IS AWESOME. She slept most of the day with the adorable stuffed bear that was waiting for her at the house from Nana and Papa when she got home from surgery. She names him
Saturday (TODAY): She woke up with a 4 or 5/10 paid so I gave her some pain meds then went right back to sleep. She spent most of the day that way but is up and moving around now. Still lots of burning when she pees but I think it’s a downhill road from here.
FUTURE: LOTS of water! Less salt in her diet! NO MORE KIDNEY STONES.
PS – Post surgery poop talk blog: COMING SOON!
Poor kiddo. Um, on the poop front: GET HER SOME STOOL SOFTENERS, STAT. 3 per day, every day. Toss in some Miralax and maybe a laxative for good measure. Seriously, all those meds will make her miserable when it comes time to, uh, empty house. :/ I hope she continues to feel better and has no further issues!
P.S. She looks SO much like you! There is no denying she’s yours.
I thought the stent was worse than the stone. I think I’m biased b/c I had one for like 2 weeks. Poor kiddo. Glad it’s all over with and NO MORE STONES. I was drinking like half gallon of water a day and still got one. Icky.