Pain.

That’s all you really feel at first. You hope there comes a moment when it will subside and you can feel something else. For a while it does. Then more Pain.

I have been dealing with kidney stones for what feels like my entire life. I remember coming home from a Braves game in the eighth grade and feeling a pain in my backside and although no one was around me, I thought I had just been stabbed. It was a moment of relief, then confusion, then fear. I was rushed to the hospital and the doctors told me I would just have to pass it. So I stayed and buried my face in the pillows and tried to hold it together.

I endured.

When I was discharged the doctors told me I had passed a rather small stone (extremely small for the amount of pain I had experienced) but my relief blinded me from thinking any further into it.

That was a story that happened around 6 years ago. In that time period I had multiple scans, ultrasounds, and more hospital visits. I was told that kidney stones run in my family, but I was having more complications than anyone in my family ever had. I was told it could be caused by my diet, but I had cut down on caffeine and led a healthy lifestyle. Yet the pain still came back. For a while there I would experience no pain and just live my life. Then weeks, months, sometimes years, the pain would come back. Lower right hand side always. Always that same damned spot. So the pain would come and go. Relief, confusion, fear. Repeat.

In early May 2016, my pain came back. This time relief didn’t seem to be part of it. So back to the hospital we went.

I remember this moment where I was laying on a bench in the front room. It was early in the morning and there were people everywhere. All of them were waiting just like me. I held my sides and clenched my teeth as hard as could and tried to think about anything else, to no avail. I remember my mom asking if I could get some type of pain medicine now, but they weren’t allowed to administer anything until I was in a room. So I sat there for hours. I sat there and tried to endure. Then I remembered something else. I remember when I was in the eighth grade and I had come to the hospital for the first time. My family was with me and the place was busy. Just like it was now. 6 years had gone by and here I was on the same bench I had been on the first time and nothing had changed. I felt defeated. Somehow my body had let me down and so had my ability to fight for it.

I knew something was different this time. It was. This time they found a 7mm stone in my lower right hand side. Relief swept through me. They had finally found it. It had been so big and had moved so much that my scans did not detect it. That was confusing. How did no one catch that?

They told me the only way to get it out was surgery. Then came the fear.

It’s a scary thing to go through something you do not know much about. It’s even more scary to do it alone. However, I was not alone. I remember my mom next to me before I went under for the surgery. I remember my dad picking me up after the surgery was over. I also remember them being by my side when I had to go back to receive another procedure because the first one was unsuccessful. Relief, confusion, fear. I went through those stages over and over again until they became tedious. I let each one of them blind me, consume me, control me. But when I woke up from that second surgery I knew that there would always be a chance that I might wake up in the same spot 6 years later, just like that bench. But until then I still have 6 years of living to do. They are going to be filled with plenty of things that I cannot control, just as these instances were, but the one thing I learned from any of this is that pain is a part of life. So is the relief, confusion, fear and all the other emotions that come with it. However, what emotions you allow to take the wheel is your choice even if it might not always seem that way. In the face of pain we can all feel defeated. Throughout this experience I felt that so many times. But even so, that does not mean we stop fighting. We put our head down and we try to hold it together. We endure.