This morning I woke up from a very strange dream with pain in my side, it felt like the right side of my lower back had seized up and was not letting go. It was among the worst pain I've ever experienced, and once my wife spent some time walking on my back to work it out and I took some leftover muscle relaxant from the last time I had similar problems... it was not getting better at all. I could not find a way to sit, lay, stand, move, or anything that would lessen the pain (I usually can with muscle problems).
Scared that I had slipped a disc or something along those lines, I agreed to go to the ER.
Long story short, I have a kidney stone. Let me give you the rundown:
- 0 Percosets: Incredible pain that defies description.
- 1 Percoset: It only feels like someone has stabbed me in the side and is twisting the knife for fun.
- 2 Percosets: It feels like I've got a deep muscle ache, like a healing torn muscle or something like that.
By way of perspective, the ER doctor told me the following: Women who had been through both child birth and kidney stones said that kidney stones were the more painful of the two.
I managed to sleep for a couple or three hours before the painkillers wore off tonight and I woke up yet again to strange dreams trying to work the massive pain into the narrative. I suspect that's how my night will go.
Tomorrow I try to get some doctor appointments at my GP and a urologist, and see how to survive until I manage to pass this thing.
It is tempting to say, being in the early stages of a startup and pushing hard to get the product ready to launch, that the timing could not be worse. That would be naive, it could very easily be much worse, but regardless it is bad timing. The trick now is to figure out what valuable things I can get done under the influence of narcotic painkillers that I don't have to spend a bunch of time later cleaning up after.
