… continued from here.

Before the stent was inserted, Mr. Consultant had assured me “sure, you could fly back to Australia the next day.” The day after the procedure, drugged up on painkillers and with two wee bags attached (one from the kidney, and one from my whotsit) I remembered to ask him whether my wee would continue to be pink and was this pain normal? He said it was, and pronounced me fit to fly home. I quickly became convinced the man was nuts.

The next day, a resident removed my two wee bags and gave me an extra night in hospital before discharging me. The trip home was horrendous: I had this constant urge of feeling like I had to pee, not to mention feeling crampy and sore. There was no way in God’s green earth that I felt fit enough to get on an aeroplane to England let alone a long-haul flight to Australia. I’d asked the resident whether this desperate need to urinate that I was constantly experiencing would subside. He explained the stent irritates the bladder (one end being stuck in my kidney and the other right in the middle of my bladder) and while some people get used to it, I would need to take bladder relaxers to help. ‘They hadn’t told me THIS beforehand,’ I thought to myself. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems, folks, the stent wasn’t err… technically… err.. necessary… or even… errr….desirable. They could have whipped the bloomin’ stone out the day after Boxing Day! Hang on, I’ve jumped forward too far. I have to continue the saga from my last post.

Nearly every doctor I saw at the three hospitals was Muslim. (I never knew there were so many Muslims in Ireland, but now I know where to find them.) It was a bit awkward with the gyny (Muslim from Ghana if I recall correctly) as it included an internal ultrasound up an orifice I usually reserve for my husband. The anaesthetist (Muslim from Libya) was lovely, he held my hand and didn’t make me count backwards from ten. The X-Ray doc (Muslim from Pakistan) was on his last day of duty in Ireland before he flew back that evening. He expressed a homesickness and puzzled inability to understand why the Irish drank so much. The two admitting docs (Muslims from the sub-continent) in hospital#2 triaged solely in Urdu, and four of the various residents I saw in hospital#3 were Muslims. Read the rest of this entry »

“I’ll write you up for pethadine. They did a survey and found that the pain from kidney stones is worse than childbirth,” said the doctor with the English accent. She was black, beautiful and (as someone believing in appropriate pain management) a bloody Godsend!

You could have knocked me over with a feather if you had told me I would spend most of my precious annual leave dealing with a kidney stone. This is not the Irish holiday I envisioned, that is for sure. Human beings plan, but Allah is the best of planners. I’m blaming it on my hedonistic lifestyle: no to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and sex outside of marriage, but a big ‘ole YES PLEASE to chocolate and Iced-Coffee flavoured milk.

On the day before Christmas I awoke to a strong pain on my left side, nausea and cramping. The week before I’d gotten sick and blamed it on a dodgy chicken burger from the local Chippy, but this time around I’d eaten the same as everyone else and I was the only sick person. My mother-in-law’s illicit drugs weren’t working (her stockpile of Distalgesic tablets that had been withdrawn due to serious complications in overdose: namely death) and I was starting to consider enlisting in a Vote-for-Legalising-Euthanasia lobby group.

By 7am on Christmas morning I had had enough and woke my husband to get him to drive me to the hospital. The last time I had done this (woken sleeping husband to act as an ambulance) was in 2000 when I was suffering asthma complications due to contracting whooping-cough. In the intervening seven years I had not forgiven him his 3am-hesitation at performing this service, and this time round he only meekly asked “right-now? okay.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is just a quick update, Umm Yasmin has spent eleven days in hospital with a kidney stone and renal colic. Her kidney was drained and she had a stent put in to by-pass the stone. Unfortunately, the kidney stone is too large to remove so it will have to be blasted with ESWL, so she is not in the best form at the moment (nothing serious, but she is on pain-relief medication and not up to blogging.) She figures she must have a lot of sins to expiate and would appreciate your dua’s.