Kidney Calamity

I hate being a burden to other people and interrupting their daily routines. I regularly feel like a fifth wheel in social situations. I rarely try and spontaneously start a social event because that would mean getting other people to conform to my schedule. And I do not like asking for help unless I absolutely must.

A number of years ago I was preparing to serve a embark on a great journey to Thailand. I had been planning this for months, and was going to be gone for about 2 years.

I was stoked.

In the few days before leaving I spent time with relatives and friends in the area. I was happy to celebrate my upcoming adventure with them, and I had a great time with the various activities and celebrations.

The day before embarking on my adventure to Thailand, I spent time with some family friends who were going to take me to the training center the next morning. I enjoyed spending a lot of time with them that day. Coincidentally, it was their youngest son’s birthday, and in the evening they decided to go out and have some ice cream.

We all crammed into their car and headed toward the ice cream parlor. As we descended a hill in the last quarter-mile before the parlor, I felt this incredible pain in my back.

The pain started innocently enough. I decided to ignore it, but the pain grew in intensity as time went on.

We arrived at the parlor, and people started ordering ice cream, but I could hardly walk, let alone think about what flavor I wanted, because of the pain.

The father in the family noticed that I was white as a sheet and asked how I was doing.

“Not good.”

I don’t remember much after that. We all packed back into the car and they took me to the hospital, where we spent the next several hours trying to figure out what was going on. Most of that process was a bit of a blur to me.

Turns out that I had a kidney stone at the ripe old age of 19 years and 2 months. It showed up clearly on the x-ray.  And I had to endure the pain until it passed.

I felt terrible. The worst part wasn’t the physical pain I suffered.  Nearly everything I hate doing I had to do, all in the space of a few hours. I became a burden to other people. I had to ask for help. (I certainly couldn’t help myself in a state of such pain.) Other people had to conform to the schedule my kidney set, and I interrupted people’s plans. Here it was, an extremely momentous day for me, and my friend’s birthday, and I ruined it.

Stupid kidney.

However, I was able to go on my adventure, and thankfully have had only one other, smaller kidney stone since then (about 4 years after the first).

Which begs the question: why the big kidney stone on that particular day?

Still, it could have been worse. I could have had the kidney stone in Thailand.