That would be kidney stooones.

When you read the title, you have to say it in your head like they do on Friends in the episode where Joey has kidney stones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3ITjqLSAZY

My poor husband had a kidney stone once after we were first married (about 8 years ago), but hasn't had any since... until last week.

He had been having some back pain during Thanksgiving break, but thought it was from not sleeping in his own bed. Chris doesn't normally have back pain bad enough to take pain medication for, but we really didn't think much about it.

Then, last Tuesday morning, he woke up in pretty severe pain that kept getting worse and worse. The pain eventually got so bad that he started throwing up from it. I wanted to take him to the hospital even though we were pretty sure it was a kidney stone because he was so sick he was scaring me. He was vomitting and falling all over the floor and literally writhing in pain.

He, however, just wanted to go to Urgent Care, so that's where we started (once he finally settled down enough to make it to the car). At Urgent Care, they gave him a shot for the pain and some meds for the nasuea, and pretty much immediately diagnosed him with kidney stones. They tried to give him an IV but he was so dehydrated from vomitting that they couldn't get it in either arm. This whole time, I'm sitting there all masked up because I wanted to minimize my exposure to all the nasty germy people also visiting Urgent Care. Then, they sent us to the hospital.

At the hospital, they did an ultrasound (Chris's first!) to see how major the kidney stone(s) were and to make sure his kidneys were still functioning. It was a little odd for him to be getting the ultrasound while I sat next to him in the chair. At one point, the nurse left the room and I told Chris to hand me to wand so we could peek at the baby, but the nurse came back before he had a chance :-).

Chris was finally sent home with a strainer to wait for the stone to pass. However, after the doctor looked at the Ultrasound results, he determined that the stone was too big to pass and that Chris would have to go in to have it blasted. He set up a referral for Chris to see a Urologist to get everything arranged.

That was all a week ago.

Today, the kidney stone FINALLY passed on its own! Hooray! We were a little stressed about another potentially expensive medical procedure (it's been a rough year for us with all the medical bills). Chris will still see the Urologist, but hopefully there are no more stones and he can rest easy for a while.

Kidney stones... would never recommend them :-)