Head Cheese, Heart Strings, and Kidney Stones.

     Thursday it finally happened. A long week finally came to an end with the passage of my 20th kidney stone. For those of you who have never experienced the pain involved in the passage of a stone, all I can tell you is that it is often compared to childbirth. Childbirth that can last a week or more. This got me to thinking about pain and how I deal, or sometimes don't deal with it.

     Pain varies greatly in severity and type. Since this blog is an exercise for me and my brain, I am going to walk you through my pains. They may seem trivial to some who have experienced great pains in their life, but please do not take offense. I know we all experience many forms of pain and each of our brains react differently. What to some may seem like a 10 on that silly smiley face scale at the doctors office, may only be a five on someone else's scale.

 Not a very good tool, if you ask me. Also pain is very relative. The first time you slam your hand in the door it may seem as if your fingers will fall off, but by the third or fourth time most of the pain may come from the fact your a fool for doing the same foolish thing again and again. So, dear reader, lets take a trip down my memory lane of pain.

     To date, I have had one broken bone and enough stitches to make a sweater. I broke my arm when I was younger and all I can remember is skateboarding, crashing, blacking out and waking up inside. I don't remember the pain much so I can't speak directly to it. I do remember many of my open wounds that required stitches. Usually they only hurt for a minute and then the pain subsided. Not very high on the pain scale.
     Not until I had my first kidney stone had I experienced real pain. Your first kidney stone is a unique experience. I felt for sure that I was dying. The pain so intense that you can hardly focus. At some point it hurt so much that I began vomiting. My wife and I headed for the emergency room immediately. I thought this was it. Some strange entity had taken oven my body and I was experiencing (The big one). The emergency room staff seemed much less alarmed at my condition. After vomiting into the trash can I was asked to provide a specimen for the nurse. Well if the pain didn't have me freaked out at this point then the sight of urinating something akin to tomato juice surely did. The nurse's suspicions were confirmed. Kidney stone. I wasn't dying, but that still left the pain to deal with. A couple shots or morphine later I was good to go. I am not advocating drugs, but they were fantastic in the face of such pain.
     Now after 20 stones, I can tell you it gets easier. My latest stone was one of the biggest and I think I handled it pretty well. It's all how you perceive the pain. Since I know what is causing it I can wrap my head around it. It is just a signal from the nerves in my kidney to my brain that something is wrong. That is it. Just a neural system of checks and balances. Meditation (and some painkillers) make it very manageable. Up until about a year ago I still felt this was the worse pain I could experience. I was wrong.
    I have a couple of blown discs in my back that cause me a lot of trouble. No where close to kidney stone pain, but pretty bad. I went in for a routine Myelogram. A myelogram is an x-ray test in which dye is injected directly into your spinal canal to help show places where the vertebrae in your back may be pinching the spinal cord. One complication of this procedure is that cerebral spinal fluid may leak out. It is a clear, colorless fluid, that occupies the  sub arachnoid space and the ventricular system around and inside the brain and spinal cord. In essence, the brain "floats" in it. When balance is lost in your head you develop what is known as a spinal headache. I have to tell you, this was 10 to the power of 10 smiley faces worse than the worst kidney stone. My mother rushed me to the closest emergency room. They then took me on an ambulance ride to another hospital. For two days I endured the worst headache imaginable. I laid in bed hooked up to a morphine drip with a blanket over my head to block out the light for about 48 hours. I couldn't wrap my head around this type of pain because I couldn't think. I couldn't function at all. Eventually it started to get better and I got to leave the hospital. So that is my 9 on the smiley face scale. Now my 10.

    I had taught myself to deal with most pain. How to cope. How to rationalize what I was feeling in order to make in manageable in my head, then the unimaginable happened. I lost a dear friend early this year. The pain was something I had not experienced before. I didn't know where to go with it to make it make sense so I could deal with it. The pain was not in my head, but in my heart. How do you cope with that when there is no way to come up with a solution to manage it. I was in disbelief. This was a person who I spoke to every day about the ordinary stuff. You know, the one person you have outside your family that you tell all you stuff to. If one of my kids did something I thought was great, this was who I told. If I was down about something, this was the person that I bounced ideas off of to make myself feel better. We talked just between us for about a half hour each day. Then, all of a sudden, it was over. I didn't have that outside person to talk to anymore. It was just nice to talk with someone about whatever that has different experiences than you. See what they think. I don't have that anymore, and it gives me a great pain in my heart.

     I'm still about a seven on the pain scale, but I am learning to cope with this as well. All injuries seem to heal over time whether they are in your head, kidneys or heart. Some just seem to take a little longer. So with a saddened heart I thank you dear readers for reading. Next one, I hope, is a little cheerier.

Steve