Back in the E-E-ER!

Tuesday night I reluctantly ended up back in the emergency room. That horrible pain in my side was still recurring, with a midgrade one occuring Monday night after I had gotten home from the hospital, and then one on Tuesday afternoon that made me think that all of my innards on my right side was going to explode! Alex called my surgeon's office and the doctor on call said that it couldn't have been a pinched nerve, because of how often the pain was recurring. We went to another hospital that was still in our primary care network and after a 2 hour wait, we were finally seen by none other than the same doctor as my first trip. I guess you could call it lucky, because we didn't have to start over from scratch with all of the medical history. He had me drink a nasty tasting liquid which was equivilent to the size of a big gulp from 7-11 so that I could take a CT scan. It turned out that I have a kidney stone about 2 mm in size, but still packed a powerful pain punch! They said it's like a grain of sand, but it hurts because it's not perfectly round and scraping its way down the urethra. Usually they let patients go because it normally passes on its own, but since I was in so much pain and my back meds weren't working for this pain, they admitted me for pain management. I got a room at about 7:30 on Wednesday morning and was discharged today at almost 3. There were so many complicating factors surrounding my stay in the hospital because of my upcoming back surgery, but to make a long story short, I'm having an outpatient surgery tomorrow to remove the kidney stone. Sigh...so many hospital visits and I haven't even had the disc replacement surgery yet!