It was like pulling teeth, sort of

Except that it wasn’t. That is a poor analogy.

Now it can be told. Not that it couldn’t have been told before, but I simply chose not to share the information.

For nearly two weeks I have been doing battle with a very large kidney stone, or perhaps I should say a very large stone in one of my kidneys. (It’s the stone that was large, not the kidney. I mean, I may have a large kidney, I don’t know, but that is not pertinent to the story.)

Depending on various expert estimates, the stone was 5-6mm, or 8mm, or 10mm. It weren’t goin’ noplace on its own, ducky.

As of this evening, finally, all the pain is gone, due to the fact that I went into the hospital today and the kidney stone is now gone.

Kaput.

Blasted to smithereens.

I did not undergo the perhaps more-familiar Extra-corporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL) , a procedure in which a kidney stone is blasted from without with sound (a sonic wave) in an attempt to break it into smaller, you should excuse the expression, chunks, which can pass more easily through the ureter into the bladder.

I underwent the perhaps less-familiar ureteroscopy.

My ureteroscopy today was not from without. It was most definitely from within. It involved inserting a tube with a laser and a camera into Mr. Peepee in an attempt to touch the stone (with the laser, silly, not with the camera) and dissolve it (the stone, silly, not the laser).

The procedure, I am happy to report, worked. I would have had to wait five more days to get the sonic-blast ESWL because I take low-dose aspirin daily for my heart condition, and a person has be off blood-thinners for a period before ESWL is tried. Then, if that procedure failed (and it does, 15% of the time) , I would still have had to undergo the laser ureteroscopy anyway, which is almost always successful. So I opted for the Less Is More (also known as the Why Prolong The Agony? approach.

I feel normal again.

Not that any of you ever really knew what “normal” might look like in my case. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

There are eight million kidney stone stories in The Naked City.

This has been just one of them.