It sure is not a 5-star hotel reception but the ER is effective and efficient enough. Having been registered before, it only takes a few minutes to get the paperwork ready and being handed over to a very nice nurse named Pauline.

A series of tests follows, I shall not go into details but pleasant it is not. A combination of these tests as well as a blood analysis will determine the next steps or so I am told.

In the meantime, I am left alone with my thoughts, a paper-thin gown that closes with all the structural integrity of a pinky promise, and a blood pressure cuff that seems personally offended by my arm. I have decided the gown was designed by someone who has never once needed to bend over, sit down, or exist in public.

The waiting is its own genre of entertainment.  Thankfully I have my phone and internet. Wires , tubes are sticking out here and there. 

Pauline returns periodically with the calm efficiency of someone who has seen every possible way a human can react to a needle, and mine, apparently, barely registers on her scale. “You’re doing great,” she says, in the same tone one might use for a toddler who has successfully stacked two blocks. I decide to take the compliment.

No verdict yet — just the low hum of machines doing their quiet arithmetic and the promise that answers are coming, eventually, on hospital time, which everyone knows runs on its own private calendar.

The Verdict

We are now 24 hours later, I am at home since last night. I was released. I have to say that despite knowing what awaits me, I am thoroughly relieved. The hospital is plastered with posters regarding early diagnostic and passing blood is a major indication of possible cancers (prostate, bladders etc). Hence my reluctance to face the possible bad news. Fact is I have none of that, only a fairly large kidney stone. It is not my first one and I know what awaits me as far as pain and a hospital visit in the coming days or weeks. But somehow it is a major relief. No big C in sight.

I have to express my thanks to the hospital staff. Sure it is not a 5 star hotel as mentioned before but their professionalism and well oiled routine is to be admired. The wait sometimes can appear long but they do not stop.

So there it is: not the plot twist the posters were fishing for, just a rock. A geological event, occurring, inconveniently, inside me rather than somewhere scenic like a riverbed. I’ve apparently decided to skip the “get a nice piece of jewelry” step of mineral formation and go straight to “make a grown man reconsider his life choices at 3am.”

Four times now. You’d think by the fourth kidney stone we’d have an understanding, the stone and I, some kind of mutual respect built on shared history. We do not. Each one arrives like it’s the first, fashionably late, uninvited, and utterly convinced it’s the main character of my evening. I’ve concluded these things don’t learn. They just reload.

Still — perspective is a wonderful drug, arguably better than whatever they were giving me in there. Twenty-four hours ago “cancer” was a word doing laps around my head, and today my biggest problem is a mineral deposit that will eventually, dramatically, and against all dignity, leave the building. That is, medically speaking, what we call a good trade.

As for the MRI math — thirty minutes a person, call it two an hour, and that’s presumably with more than one machine running, though I didn’t see a fleet. Whatever the throughput, nobody rushed, nobody cut corners, and nobody handed me a bill on the way out. My American friends, feel free to sit with that one for a moment.

Next chapter: waiting for the stone to make its move, and trying to convince myself that “quickly and comfortably” isn’t an oxymoron in this particular saga. History says it is. History and I have been here before.

🩺🩺🩺