The Unknown

It scares me.

What I DO know probably scares me even worse.

I have a 5 mm stone in my left kidney.  That's between 3/8 and 1/4 inch, for those of you that are metrically challenged.  Or, if you're me, 5mm is about the size of a large boulder, for all intents and purposes.

It's kidney stone #7 for me.  I've had 3 in the last year.  (You know about all of them if you're a regular reader of my blog.)  That's 3 too many, in my opinion.

The good thing is that for the first time, I feel like I'm headed down the path to figuring out what is causing my kidney stones and how I might be able to keep them from recurring.  I've done a 24-hour study and they've taken blood to help determine exactly what the stones are and why my body might be producing them.  Hopefully that will lead to some sort of dietary change or medication or SOMETHING that will at LEAST increase the interval between kidney stones.

So tomorrow afternoon, I'll be back in the doctor's office, discussing options for getting this boulder out.  There are a couple of "surgical" options, neither of which involve incisions or stitches or anything like that.  One involves thumping the stone with focused sound waves to break it up into smaller stones that will hopefully pass more easily than a single 5mm stone.  The other option involves retreiving the stone with a scope.  That thought gives me the heebie jeebies, but it's still better than trying to let nature run its course in this situation.  I'm sure than none of my other stones were larger than about 2mm in size and they were excruciating.  I can't imagine how much pain a 5mm stone would cause.

So hopefully, by this time next week, I'll be on the mend and life will be getting back to some semblance of normal again.  The unknown will no longer scare me, and the known will be reduced and relegated to the past.

And yes, this, too, shall pass.