another unexpected week

For those of you who have not heard, kidney stones have made their way back into my life, disrupting our little routine.

Sunday night, Cody went to bed shortly after the kids, however I have a lot of paperwork to get done yet before I'm done with school, so I stayed up a while and worked on that. I wasn't in bed long before waking up with excruciating back pain. I wasn't sure if I had just been laying wrong, or if I needed to go to the bathroom, or if I was in labor?  I walked around the living room a while, drank some water, and tried to sit in some different positions, hoping something would make the pain less intense. Well, nothing was seeming like it was helping. When I started paying more attention to my pain, I was noticing that it was only on my right side, in my lower back. It wrapped itself around my side and down into my groin area (this is exactly like the pain I had the first time with kidney stones, only it was on the opposite side).

I called the on-call doctor, just to make sure ... or to at least make myself feel better :)  She had said it didn't sound like labor or contractions, but I should take some Tylenol and try to get some rest. And if the pain didn't go away in an hour or so to come in and they would check things out. So I woke Cody up and gave him an update. I took some Tylenol, crawled back into bed and "tried" to get some rest. I don't think I laid there for more than 3 minutes when I was up again telling him we needed to go. Fortunately I had just packed our hospital bags the day before, so I threw a few last minute things in for the kids, Cody took a shower, we loaded the kids up, and away we went at 12:35am. I didn't know how I was going to last the hour drive over to Sioux Falls!

Cody had to pull over on the side of the interstate several times so I could throw-up, slowing down our process, but I think he made up for it with a little speeding in between times :) My parents met us at the emergency room. We switched vehicles so they could take the kids home and get them back to bed.

After getting hooked up to the monitors and doing a little checking, it looked like I was not in labor and the baby was doing just fine! They wheeled me down do get a renal ultrasound and look for anything going on with my kidneys and bladder. They actually found quite a large stone this time around, sitting in my kidney. So they started an IV to give me some fluids and some pain medication while they ran some more tests. My urine came back showing some blood, but everything else was looking normal.

Once again, they were going to send me home with some oral pain meds, but I was hesitant. Because of what happened last time with not being able to keep anything down and because I was throwing up again this time, I didn't know if this was going to work or not. I didn't really want to go home and not be able to tolerate the pain and have to come back in and start everything over. So they decided to keep me and just see how things went through the following day. The oral pain meds weren't cutting the pain nearly enough, so they decided to switch up the medication and gave me a pump that I could give them to myself...now this, I liked :)   Although I didn't feel like it ever took my pain completely away, I felt more in control knowing that I could push my button every 10 minutes rather than waiting every 4 hours before being able to take something orally again. They also placed a catheter to help empty my bladder completely. I kept having this horrible urge to go to the bathroom  all the time!!  They thought some of my pain would go away if my bladder was emptied completely.

So anyway, I have a 9mm sized stone in my kidney and the urologist says it's something that's too big to pass on my own. The pain is more than likely coming from it moving around within my kidney. So basically I will have to just manage the pain until after the baby is born and then they will have to go in and remove the stone surgically (more on that when the time comes).

I was able to come home Tuesday afternoon with oral pain meds in hopes of just managing my pain. Because the meds have some pretty significant side effects, my doctor recommended I remain out of work the remainder of the week. We've been staying in Brandon in order for my parents to help out with the kids.