I had this happen to me last year (kidney stone). Holy shitballs on crutches. It was the most pain I have ever been in. And I have had all sorts of injuries and surgeries. This topped it all by far far far. I actually passed out from the pain. I was in the ER with pain managing medication for about 6 hours and then 1 minutes to the next gone. Not like oh it's receding... Gone like it was never there. And I felt 100% fine after. I felt embarrassed because I still had a bunch of doctors looking out for me and I was fine.
Oh and if you are a human with balls, the pain also radiates to this zone and it feels like someone is kicking you in the balls repeatedly with no rest between kicks. It suuuuucks.
And before you say 'feels like labor' naaaah I talked to several moms who have had many kids and they also agree. This is waaay worse.
Its legit no joke..
I went in to the ER with a 'no narcotics' mindset as I was just over 3 years sober.. The nurses knew it was kidney stones immediatley and literally laughed in my face, albeit nicely, when I said 'no narcotics'. They advised I take the narcotics.
I took the non narcotic option and fast forward 30 minutes... The pain was so bad I just threw up in my lap mid sentence and passed out right infront of my partner and two nurses.
yeah, kidney and gall stones are two of the things where answering 10 on the pain scale is fully accepted by doctors, nurses and everyone who has ever experienced them. source: gall stones. i legit needed help dressing up for the ambulance ride.
I had read so many comments on line about how intensely painful gallstone are, and how that pain is no joke.
I was in my second year of nursing school and the chronic niggling abdominal pain I'd had for several months changed in an instant to the most crippling colicky pain I had ever felt. I swear it radiated throughout my entire body. The way it "gripped" in my entire torso made me feel like my heart was seizing, but it was just my gallbladder full of stones.
I knew immediately what it was. I'd been ignoring the niggling pain because I had stage 4 endometriosis at the time so abdominal pain wasn't unusual. And it's a common phenomenon for medical students and nursing students to experience strange pshycogenic symptoms, especially as they learn about a new disease, and the niggling pain had started around the same time I was doing my unit on biliary and hepatic anatomy and physiology, so when my gallbladder was "grumbling" I just assumed I was imagining it.
I booked into my GP, who instantly agreed it sounded like gallstones, she ordered an ultrasound and liver function test. My gallbladder was full of stones, most were tiny, 2-3mm, but there were 4 chonky bois, and my Liver function test was all sorts of abnormal.
Up until this point, everyone had treated this very seriously. My GP was rushing around like it was urgent, when I told my teachers at nursing school that I'll likely need time off because I was dealing with gallstones they all acted like it was a catagory 2 emergency, and everyone had this assumption that in less than 2 months I'd be gallbladder-less.
I was referred for surgery. That was April, I got my intake letter and my surgery was scheduled for October.
So I spent the next 6 months in occasional agony. I was lucky that I'd get a solid 3-4 days without pain, and then I'd get an "attack" that would last a few hours but fade out.
But as it got closer to October, the attacks were lasting over 2 days, by the end I was delirious. I went to the ER twice out of desperation. Both times they gave me buscopan and told me to go home and wait for my surgery. My GP prescribed me some muscle relaxants which helped a bit.
On the night before my surgery, I was having the worse pain of the whole ordeal by far. I was fasting for surgery so I couldn't take the pain relief my GP had prescribed because it was an oral tablet. I wasn't getting any sleep, so I just went to the hospital at 2am (instead of 8am for my surgery).
I went to the ER and explained that my surgery was in the morning, I'm fasting so can't take my meds, but the pain is unbearable. They gave me, you guessed it, buscopan. I sat in the waiting room and at 7:45am said goodbye and walked over to the day surgery wing.
Everyone I told was baffled, saying gallstones were so incredibly painful there's no way I'd have to wait that long for surgery and not get proper pain relief while I waited. Even my GP was confused, I saw her once a fortnight between August and October because I was just in such a sorry state. My skin was yellow, I was shitting clay, I couldn't keep much food down, I'd lost a lot of weight. My GP would spend most of the appointment on the phone with the surgical intake team asking "what the fuck?"
But 9 years after my surgery, my best friend started getting gallbladder attacks. She went to the ER, they confirmed the stones with an ultrasound, and they referred her for surgery. 2 months later she still hadn't gotten her intake letter, so when she had another bad attack she went to the ER and they gave her buscopan and advil and told her to be patient, the surgical list is backed up. She got her letter a few days after that, surgery was booked for August.
She scrounged together some money to see a private surgeon, she saw him on February 10th, and she had her gallbladder removed on February 15th, and they sent her home with endone for the 5 days between. It took a chunk out of the savings that she and her partner want to use for a house deposit, but there's no way she could have made it to August with how much pain she was in.
"Feels like labor" doesn't hold up in a bunch of places. I met plenty of women going for 2nd, 3rd, 4th pregnancies. I ain't never heard a man say "Kick me in the balls again."
I had my first kidney stone at 18. Mine was made of calcium. My doctor asked how often I drank energy drinks and how much spinach I ate. I said a lot of both and he said pump the breaks. I stopped with the Rockstars but kept the spinach because it was obviously the energy drinks because they're so bad for you. Four years later I'm getting surgery for my third stone. Guess who doesn't eat spinach (or Tums) now?
Not medical advice. There's a variety of stone types and innumerable causes that are poorly understood. Comics and memes are also not medical advice.
Just had my 3rd surgery too a few weeks ago. I don't eat spinach but I drink a shit load of milk. They're going to do a metabolic workup on me to try and get some answers.
I feel like synthetic taurine is a lot less available than actual pig liver, since the latter is an underused byproduct of a massive industry. I would be happy if I were wrong.
I once won a bike in a punch card raffle for drinking as much monster as I do. No kidney stones yet, just a full immunity to the positive effects of caffeine and the constant threat from my body to never stop drinking them or else my head will implode from withdrawal.