A Technician Told Me I Had a Huge Mass on My Kidney
And no one would tell me what that meant.
“Have you ever had kidney surgery before?”
“No. Why?”
“You have a huge mass on your left kidney.” Those words completely reshaped my world.
They were spoken casually by a young woman with a blonde ponytail. That’s all I saw of her. I was lying in a CT machine, my brain was blissfully swimming in morphine.
“Mass?” I tried to make sense of what this girl was saying. A man was standing at the screen with her and he whispered something. “What sort of mass? What does that mean?”
“Oh… uh, I’ll let the doctor explain it.” She was backpedaling.
My morphine was wearing off, the pain was flooding back into my lower back. People say that the pain of a kidney stone is worse than the pain of childbirth. I have two kids and honestly, the biggest difference is after birth, you get a child.
After a kidney stone, you get… a kidney stone. And they don’t even let you keep it. They send it to the lab. I much preferred childbirth, but the pain was remarkably similar.
I’m not normally claustrophobic, but I swear the CT machine was shrinking as we spoke. The blonde ponytail girl left and the man at the screen…
