Miracle
I left Buffi the Kidney Slayer’s office today bewildered. Two years ago I was informed I had kidney stones in both kidneys. The ones on the left side were very small, and there were four in the right kidney. The largest was 11 mm. That’s too big to pass. Due to the “lack of meat” at the bottom of my right kidney caused by previous surgeries, my surgeon recommended cutting off the bottom of the kidney. She would have to use the rib spreader. Having been through rib spreading o...nly two years earlier, I was not gung ho about the idea. Since I had no current pain or infection she agreed to put off the surgery. Six months, and one year checkups revealed no change.
For today’s checkup I wondered how much the stones had grown and if I was closer to having to bite the bullet and go under the knife again. In my mind I ran through all the things I have been doing wrong recently: not drinking enough water, eating too much chocolate and nuts (high oxalate), and having more than two servings of calcium per day. The last couple days I have had a pain in my back. This morning I looked in the mirror to see where my scars were in relation to the pain. I determined it was too high to be the kidneys - a small relief.
Dr. Buffi came into the room with a new med student - probably the sixth or seventh to benefit from my remarkable stone building ability. First, she asked how I was doing and if I had felt any pain. I told her the only pain occurred on the right side after an ice skating fall. It hurt for a day. I surmised maybe the stone shifted to another part of the kidney causing pain. She said they compared x-rays from a year ago and last November with today’s and the stone dissipated. Whhaat? My immediate thought was that she must have made a mistake. She must be looking at someone else’s x-ray, because I last saw her in June not November. But I had forgotten that I saw her PA in November for a sick visit. Scott asked if she thought the fall broke up the stone. The doctor said the calcium-oxalate stones I build are hard and would not be broken by a fall. Her best guess is that the image of the large stone was actually a conglomeration of little stones and when I fell they scattered. She noted that she has heard of people passing stones who don’t feel them and she thinks this is what happened to me. She showed me today’s x-ray. There is a miniscule scattering of very tiny stones in the right kidney. They looked smaller than the one 2mm stone in the left kidney (which is passable, especially since I have acquired this new skill). I still wondered if this was really my x-ray, because the whole theory sounded crazy. Then, she pointed to a line on the x-ray and told me that is the clip for my gall bladder. At that point, I accepted that this was real.