Monday, June 13, 2005

and the Kidney Stone battle continues...

my regular readers know that tomorrow morning i was scheduled for a ureteroscopy (a procedure where a doctor puts me to sleep and enters my ureter tube through my urethra/bladder to extract a kidney stone that was stuck and not passing on it's own).

today i went in for some KUB (kidney ureter bladder) scans so the doctor could see the current positioning of my obstructed stone. low and behold the stone is no longer there. now, this may sound like good news right off the bat... however, some had theorized that this stone had been there for 1 1/2 to 2 years (maybe longer) and all of a sudden it's gone? without me noticing? that's odd. what was also not good news was the fact that i have ANOTHER stone... this time inside my kidney. this made me eligible for a totally different treatment.

therefore, the doctor changed my procedure tomorrow from a Ureteroscopy to an Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL). i am still going to the hospital at 5am and being put to sleep, but instead of having him enter me to extract the stone he is going to blast it with lasers in the hopes of breaking it up so i can pass it on my own. once i do more research on this procedure i will give you more details... of course.

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