Back in 1999, I had my first kidney stone. Diagnosed at first by “muscle pain – you’re overweight, you need to lose weight and do these stretches” by the Student Health Center’s finest, it was the first of many.
How many? So many I’ve lost count.
I’ve passed several, I’ve had four surgeries to get rid of two of them. I lost a job before I knew the reason I had intermittent agonizing pain and uncontrollable nausea was that I had two huge stones. One was about quarter-size, one about dime-size, one in each kidney. A combination of lithotripsy and ureteroscopies – two of each – cleared me out, all between August 2006 and April 2009.
And now there’s another one. Six millimeters. This on top of diabetes and PCOS and, just recently diagnosed, diverticular disease. My body keeps breaking and I’m still just shy of thirty. Nothing is life-threatening, but it’s the sheer annoyance from a thousand cuts. Add to that a tendency toward depression and self-destructive tendencies and here I sit, burnt out on work, desperate to get away but unable to think of something I’d rather be doing right now. I just want to go home and lie under the blankets and wallow.
I can’t afford that, though. I have bills to pay: a car note, insurance, eternal bills from the first of these surgeries, student loans, other debts. I have responsibilities, but even pulling myself out of bed at the moment is a hell of a thing.
And I’m living with my family because I can’t pay for all that stuff on my current wage and pay for rent too – I have options there, a place to go that isn’t my parents’ house, but with a surgery and convalescence and new bills and the desperate hope I’d had to take a couple of classes this semester to raise my old GPA and get into grad school. But I’m afraid now: I won’t have this good health insurance if I go back to school full time, and I am burning the hell out on this job. If I get another stone, I’ll just go even further into debt on my body as well as going into further debt on my education.
And I should be saving money, anyway, if I’m going to school. I should save every penny I have. It’s just hell on the morale not even being able to afford to move out on my own again.
I know what I have to do: go to the urologist again, go get another surgery, watch the diet, save money, all that. I’m just so damned tired of it, tired of stressing over it, tired of scheduling around it, tired of being this fragile little lump of goo and rocks. Even worrying and angsting makes me feel guilty considering the people who have so much more pain and anguish to deal with than I do: the ones who have nobody to care for them, who go to work through their chemo, the ones who don’t have insurance and go further into debt with every surgery.
It can always get worse. It just seems like it always does.
