Dom Davis (The Blog)

So having been mercifully gout free for a while now my knee has started playing up again. Last time this happened the doctor said it was tendinitis caused by walking funny thanks to gout in my toes, but I’m not so sure. Other than driving I’ve not done anything over the past few days that would cause tendinitis to flair up.

Regardless, my knee now hurts like he’ll when I try and bend it. This makes things like getting dressed and walking to work slightly awkward. Still I’m perseveringly and slowly making my way towards the office looking like I’m working for the Ministry of Funny Walks. I’m also having to take a different route as they’re trimming the trees along my more usual route. This is A Good Thing™ as the branches were getting a tad low.

Yesterdays slushy didn’t happen unfortunately due to a lack of sufficiently sugary drink to apply to the machine. I also have gout in my knee which is a tad sore and difficult to walk on.

Now I’m a great believer in modern medicine and will happily throw great handfuls of pills down my throat if it will work. That said I’m not adverse to more traditional treatments to supplement this. For example, cherry juice is supposed to be very good for you when you have gout. It’s also high in sugar if you don’t get the reduced sugar stuff I normally get.

Yup, you can see where we’re going here can’t you? Cherry slushy to wash down a handful of pills. It’s certainly one way to turn a problem into a resolution start point.

That said, having a knee that I can barely walk on is problematic at best, not least due to the fact I’m supposed to be going clubbing this weekend. I shall be guzzling loads of water over the next 24 hours but if it hasn’t improved by tomorrow it may be a trip to the doctors for a slightly more permanent solution that a never ending prescription for NSAIDs to manage the pain and swelling. Hopefully this will be another set of pills to manage the root cause rather than a “no really, change your diet” answer otherwise meal times could become distinctly dull. At least I’ll have slushy to wash everything down with

* Can you see what I did there?

There’s a certain irony in the fact that when my procedure finally went ahead it ended up not bring needed. Seems they couldn’t find the stone anywhere which leads them to the conclusion I must have passed it. This is good in some respects and not so good in others.

Despite not actually finding the thing they did go have a good look for it. With more than the average amount of tubing to go hunting through this takes time, causing irritation, especially at the entry point. Suffice to say I was a bit sore when I woke up.

I am now pain free (although to be fair I don’t believe in pain management, I subscribe to pain eradication and just being bolloxed for a few days) and, more importantly for work, able to think my way out of a wet paper bag. This does, unfortunately mean I actually have to go in. Hey ho, at least it’s a short week

However many years ago it was I last saw my urologist he told me I had a small kidney stone on the right hand side. It wasn’t doing much so he suggested we leave it and see what happened. There are two ways this stone can leave my body: naturally and artificially. Passing a stone smarts a little and it’s the kind of thing you notice. I’ve not passed the stone. lithotripsy, ureteroscopy and other artificial methods of getting rid of stones are also not the kind of thing that would go unnoticed so I think we can safely say I still have a stone.

These days I no longer have the fancy health insurance with the Harley Street urologists and am dependent on the NHS who, while great at scooping you up off the floor and getting you going again, can be a bit slow for non urgent things. If we remember I rocked up to A&E on valentines day complaining of a kidney stone. They x-rayed me, gave me some nice painkillers (although not the really nice ones) and sent me home with the message that they’d be in touch.

A few months later I got a letter saying I’d been referred to a consultant and that they wanted to give me a CT scan. CT scans are much more fun than X-Rays (and infinitely more fun than IVUs which are basically a legal form of diagnostic torture) so that was cool. Then I had to go speak to the consultant (pitch up to outpatients, wait for over an hour) to be told the CT was inconclusive and they wanted to do another CT. Could have been done by letter, but at least I was being processed. CT the second was a few weeks ago.

Today I got a letter from my consultant. Turns out I have a kidney stone. It’s not moved since the first CT and they’d like to remove it. Apparently they are now able to see the kidney stone on my original X-Ray “now that they know what they’re looking for”. Clue was in the “I have a kidney stone in my right hand side”, but there you go, at least they found this one (they’re now 2 for 5).

I’m now on a waiting list for a rather fun little procedure where they shove a laser up your… well, lets just say they put you to sleep and when you wake up there’s no stone and it hurts like hell to pee. This is an overnight job which will then involve a couple of days recovery. Why am I telling you all this? Well basically I will require VAST amounts of sympathy during the recovery time and I want you all to be prepared.

This morning I woke up with a slight twinge in my side. Nothing unusual in that. These days I wake up with all kinds of aches and twinges, but todays twinge didn’t go away. Instead it decided to get steadily worse until, at about 8am, I decided enough was enough and I was going to fight back with some of the more potent pain killers in our medicine cabinet. Unfortunately these take time to kick in and I ran out of the quick fix tactical nuclear pain killers some time ago so things started to get even more painful.

After a few minutes walking round the house in a fashion similar to the oh-my-god-I-need-the-loo-but-someone-is-in-the-bathroom thing the people do when they don’t think anyone else is looking [or is that just me?] I decided I’d better pack a bag with a few bits in it just in case this wasn’t going to get better by itself. After all, I know this pain and the conclusion is, more often than not, A&E.

After having packed my bag¹ things were getting to be really quite bad and it was making me cry so I called in reinforcements to take me somewhere with better pharmacological supplies than I have. Unfortunately, en-route we found out that the local drop in places wouldn’t take me and that I was going to have to go to A&E (see, told you). Joy.

1 hour later and I’m being dressed in one of those ever so fetching gowns with a nurse shoving a cannula² in my arm and another nurse doing the blood pressure and temperature thing. Of course, by this time the pain was easing and I’m beginning to think that maybe I should have just ridden it out and not bothered everyone.

6 hours after that and I’ve been X-rayed, pumped full of contrast, X-rayed again several times, peed into tubes and pots, had blood taken and told a number of people that I woke up this morning and I started hurting in the same way I hurt the previous God knows how many times I’ve had kidney stones.

Upshot of it all is they can’t see a stone (although that’s not to say there isn’t one there), they can see inflamation, there is blood in my urine and they’ve given the the pharmacological items I need to stop it hurting should it start again³). Although this morning I was in very real pain time has dulled the memory of the pain and I am left thinking perhaps it was all a storm in a teacup :s Still, for places to take your fiancée on valentines day A&E has to be up there on the list

¹ Clean underwear, clean tshirts, clean socks, laptop, charger for laptop, charger for iPhone, headphones – no toothbrush or toothpaste :S

² You know, the things they jab in your arm with the 18foot metal spikes that stick into your veins and will rip your arm open causing you to bleed to death if you so much as think about looking at it in the wrong way just so they can take blood and pump you full of contrast easily.

³ Unfortunately none of it opiate or synthetic opiate based but I they’re moving away from that these days and at the end of the day if it stops the owie I’m happy.