Let’s talk about Kidney Stones, shall we? The medical definition is Kidney stones are hard deposits of minerals and acid salts that stick together in concentrated urine. They can be painful when passing through the urinary tract, but usually don't cause permanent damage.
The most common symptom is severe pain, usually, on the side of the abdomen, that's often associated with nausea. But MY personal definition contains a plethora of FOUR-LETTER WORDS/GRUNTS/GROANS/WHY ME GOD, AND NOT AGAIN! My introduction to this wrath of nature began in 1989 and lasted until 1999. Yeppers, for a decade, on or around my birthday in October, I gave birth to one kidney stone a year, for 10 years, and began labor pains on or around my birthday, until plopping out of an opening in my body, (WAY TOO SMALL for anything but perhaps a yellow substance of liquid), was a hard clunk on the porcelain throne, a nugget announcing its fucking arrival!
Uh-Huh. And here is the thingie I noticed after my second entrance to Dante’s Inferno…that when arriving at the Emergency Room at any hospital (during my 10 years I visited large, small, urban, rural Emergency Rooms and had, family, friends, and co-workers, bear the brunt of both verbal and non-verbal abuse) there were TWO kinds of Nurses and Doctors…Those Medical Personnel who had either experienced the dubious delight of SEVER PAIN due to something as rotten as a Kidney Stone, or those who HAD NOT. How, you may ask did I know this…EASY…because upon my arrival the Emergency Room Staff would either say “OH IT WILL PASS, DON’T WORRY” (I must add here and now, that to this day I still wish a curse of Kidney Stones on them) OR they would IMMEDIATELY MUTTER, Demerol, or Morphine Drip STAT! (I used to love the word STAT, and eventually, I came to call Demerol and Morphine my Demi Moore, elixir! About my fourth year of KIDNEY STONE HELL, upon my arrival I would wait about 5 minutes, impatient that the STAFF was not listening to THIS PATIENT and become belligerent (One is permitted to become belligerent when the only thing that can almost stop the pain is a combo of DEMI MORRE) and insist I be given NARCOTICS. And once again those who had never experienced Natures Doom, would whisper, was I a Drug Addict, and those who had EVER lived through the Kidney Stone Journey said “STAT!”
Recently some friends of mine came down with COVID. They HAD been vaccinated, and when the VIRUS hit them this time, ALL of them were thankful they had received the vaccination, because the symptoms they suffered from, were terrible, but not BAD enough to drive them to the EMERGENCY ROOM. Oftentimes, when asking my friends “What it felt like”, the response was with sentences using FOUR-LETTER WORDS…BUT… always ending with the phrase, “I can NOT imagine having COVID without having been vaccinated.” I am sorry that oftentimes empathy or intelligence, or compassion or common sense, are vacant because YOU or ME have no idea of pain or suffering, duress, or damnation of another. And too often help comes with the word STAT!
