Friday morning I woke up and developed a terrible pain in my left abdomen. I thought that it would be just temporary, and I would still be able to go to school, but I was sure wrong. It at points reached level 7 intenseness in pain, and I could not make the agony go away. I ended up going to the ER instead of school, because it sure looked like learning wasn’t going to do me any immediate good. I laid on a hospital bed for around an hour and a half, while the hospital staff tried to figure out why the heck I was there in the first place.
Finally, after laying in pain, the were able to figure out from a cat scan that I had a kidney stone, something that usually only older people get. I was injected with narcotics, and then told I could leave while I was still drugged and unbalanced.
To top it all off, once I arrived home I took a nap and woke up with no pain. The stone had passed. Unfortunately, I decided I wanted to take a shower, because I was feeling grimy. Bad idea. With drugs still in me, and the fact that I was still weak, I ended up fainting. Halfway through my free fall I banged my head, and then nicked my back on the tub spout, which caused me to wake up. On the bright side I felt great after that and had the opportunity to go on a walk and enjoy the sunshine that Astoria has been experiencing. I felt rather chipper considering all things.
While in the ER, one of the things that came to mind while I was laying there was Brian Regan’s account of the ER. When they asked me to rate my pain, I couldn’t help but think back to how he had described it. Level 8 is a good number if you like morphine. The video is shown below.
