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Jesup, Georgia 31545

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

75

Could kidney stones slow population growth?

Twenty-five years ago, my knees buckled. I had been shot in the back. Thats what I thought, but I didnt hear the explosion. Maybe my assassins .44 magnum was rigged with a silencer. But who wanted me dead? Crawling for the phone, I stopped to feel for blood. Why wasnt I bleeding? I searched my lower back, again. My palm was sweaty, but there was no blood. And thats when nausea fired the second shot. The phone call would have to wait. In between heaves, I wondered if I would live to learn what had hit me. After having thrown up everything but my toenails, I dialed our family physician, Dr. Bob Phillips. Bob, I gasped. Its my lower back. Ive been shot, but I didnt hear the gun! Bob chuckled. Friends can get away with that. Welcome to the world of kidney stones, he said. Meet me at the emergency room. When I staggered into the hospital, the nurse fast-tracked me to a room and handed me a strainer. Thatd have to wait. I was too busy hugging the toilet bowl, thinking I really was going to throw up my toenails. When Bob arrived, I showed him the culprit. Right there in the strainer was a speck about the size of a single Jim Dandy grit.

My Opinion
MMM
I was proud, but disappointed. How could something that small cause such big problems? When I explained that DINK I had worked NeSMITH in the yard Chairman the day before and had gotten dehydrated, Bob nodded and said, Drink plenty of water next time. Fifteen years later, I had another uh-oh moment. I should have remembered. After several hours in a hot farm field, I got dehydrated again. Yeah, I knowdumb. At bedtime, 120 miles up the road, this time it wasnt a .44 magnum. Maybe it was just a .22, but I still felt the bang. I knew what to expect. By the time the tsunami of pain and nausea started washing over me, I was packed and rolling down the hill. It wasnt the smartest thing I had ever done, but I didnt want to get stuck in the mountains hurting. Athens-bound and 30 miles into the jaunt, I was howl-

dnesmith@cninewspapers.com

ing at the moon. I drove with one hand and held a Solo cup in the other. If I had looked in the cup, I might have seen my toenails. About Gainesville, I pulled off the road. Reaching for a legal pad, I scrawled a just-in-case-Icant-go-farther note: Kidney stone. Please take me to Dr. David Allen at Athens Regional Hospital. Thank you, and stuck it on the dash. Somehow, I got there by myself. And when I mumbled, kidney stone, the nurse rushed me to a cubicle and pumped in pain medicine. Within an hour, the torture and the stone were gone. The tab was $3,500, but I would have offered moreback on the road, around Ellijay. As I was paying the bill, I remembered someone had told me that a man having a kidney stone was as close as hed ever come to experiencing the pain a woman endures in childbirth. And that got me to thinking about a novel way to slow population growth. What if women said to men, Before I have the baby, youll have to be injected with a kidney stone? Then, fathers could say to mothers in a raspy, Bill Clinton-like voice: I feel your pain. And that gave me another thought: There would probably be more one-child families.