Pain-numbing drugs can have a mind-altering effect.

UNTIL three days ago, I didn’t even know I had a kidney stone. Until three days ago, I only had a vague idea of the location of my kidneys: somewhere in the region of my love handles. Until three days ago, I didn’t know the nature of truly excruciating pain.

Like most unbearable pains, this one came on unannounced. One minute I was sitting at my desk, and the next, a vice-like grip had taken hold of my left kidney and twisted it, as if trying to wring every ounce of moisture out of it.

As I writhed around on my chair, a colleague looked at me aghast and said, “I think you should go and see a doctor.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I gasped. “It will pass.”

But how was I to know that attempting to pass a kidney stone could be so agonizing. Half an hour later, I admitted defeat and begged my colleague to take me to the hospital.

In the hospital’s emergency room, I began screaming for medication like some crazed junkie needing a fix. The staff responded by putting me on a gurney and telling me to wait quietly until the doctor came.

Actually they didn’t say “quietly”, but I think they would have liked to have been able to. However, I’m not sure how anyone can be expected to wait quietly with a red hot poker stabbing one of their vital organs.

When the doctor finally arrived, three years later, the nursing staff were doing a good impersonation of ignoring me. Still, I forgave them, because I think they are trained to go about their business ignoring all sorts of unreasonable tantrums thrown by overwrought patients until someone more qualified arrives to dispense the necessary words of wisdom.

With only a cursory examination, the doctor declared, “Ah, looks like you have a kidney stone!”

“How can you be so sure?” I said.

“You’re displaying the classic symptoms. I will give you a scan to confirm it, but first we need you to keep still.”

A nurse then injected my butt with 25cc of horse tranquilliser. Ten minutes later, when this had no effect, I was given another 25cc. And another 10 minutes later, I was given yet another dose. At this stage, I was beginning to feel quite groggy and pain-free.

What happened next is a bit of a blur, but I vaguely remember the doctor showing me my scan results. “Look, it’s a kidney stone! Just as I suspected,” he said. “We’ll have to operate as soon as possible because it’s stuck in your ureter.”

I was then dispatched to a ward to await my operation the next morning. As I lay on my bed, thanking the creator of horse tranquillisers, it never once occurred to me that anyone would be worrying about me. When you’re so heavily medicated, the word “worry” is completely obliterated from your vocabulary. It was only when my daughter called me that I realised that there were other people in my universe.

“Mum, where are you?” she asked, sounding concerned.

“Oh, I’m in the hospital,” I replied, quite breezily. “It’s really nice here.”

Much later, when my daughter arrived at my bedside, carrying a weekend bag containing every toiletry known to mankind, I had already drifted off into a twilight zone of my own making. Such was the effect of my pain medication.

The next morning, after a tepid shower, I was prepped and ready for the operating room. I can’t remember much of what happened before I was put under, except that everyone seemed very cheerful. And my surgeon was wearing kinky white Wellington boots – but I suspect I might have been under the influence of drugs at that stage and prone to imagining things.

While I was out cold, the medical staff pulverised that kidney stone to smithereens and sent me back to my room. With my lower body still paralysed (the effects of a lovely anaesthetic), I expressed my gratitude to the nursing staff by peeing in my bed.

That evening, my daughter, a teenager who passed her driving test barely a month ago, drove me home from the hospital. I’d had one last injection before I’d left and, for the first time, realised what a wonderful driver she’d turned into almost overnight.

Now that I’m home, minus the horse tranquillisers, I feel the full effects of my post-operative pain. However, I wouldn’t change my reality, painful though it may be, for another blurry day that’s almost lost to me.

Now, if only I could remember the name of the cute doctor who attended to me.

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