My First Kidney Stone

You never forget your first kidney stone. You never plan to because you never intend to have another.

Actually, what I remember as my first kidney stone wasn't actually my first, but I didn't know that at the time.

It was July of 1986. I was twenty-two years-old and had been in Caracas, Venezuela for just under two weeks. There were a dozen of us, mostly Bible college students on a venture to start a new church in this city of over 4 million people. This venture was in some ways my baby. It was to be my internship and was up to me to recruit enough people to make it happen. So I did. I didn't recruit everyone but did recruit about half.

We had spent the previous month in San Jose, Costa Rica learning Spanish. In that month alone, I'd already experienced food-poisoning and amoebas. But hey, I had lost weight so it wasn't that bad. I could use an amoeba right now.

So, we had rented a large house, a mansion or as they call them there, a quinta, in an upper class neighborhood in Caracas where 75% of the people lived in high-rise apartment buildings. Our Quinta was called La Fundación. In Caracas and some other parts of the Caribbean, they don't number houses. They name them. And you can name your house Jacqueline if you want, even if the house next door to you is Jacqueline. And while JFK was President of the United States, he and Jackie made a trip to Venezuela. The Venezuelans loved them. There were Quinta Jacquelines everywhere. Have you ever tried to find a house on a street by name? Well, in Caracas they had a huge, six-inch thick book like the yellow pages that lists every house by name so you can kind of find the house you're looking for. It is very clever. Who ever thought it was better to number them?

It was a two-story house, not counting the basement, which was huge. There were three large bedrooms upstairs and three large rooms downstairs with a maid's quarter. In all there were six bathrooms, the three main bathrooms all had bidets. There were two big mango trees in the backyard. There was no grass. The yard was brick, which I think is ideal. If I ever have a yard, I want it to be brick. But I don't want a mango tree, even though I adore mangoes, but when they fall from high onto the brick yard, they make a terrible mess that attracts bees.

We rented La Fundación from a really tall, eccentric woman named Carmen Pereira who spoke so fast that even her fellow Venezuelans said they couldn't understand her. And she seemed to take joy in telling you something and then asking you what she just said. I got drunk at her house one night but that's a story for later.

I was living in La Fundación. We weren't supposed to be living there. We were supposed to be “building bridges” by living with Venezuelan families. All but two of us had managed to find a place. I don't know about the other guy, but I didn't look too diligently. I'd just spent a month living with a wonderful Costa Rican family but living on my own in a mansion seemed more appealing. And just let me say right here, “Doug, I'm sorry, I didn't really look for a family to live with.” There. That's off my chest.

So one Friday morning I was showering and, I'm not kidding you, I dropped the soap. I bent to pick it up and a pain shot through my back. No big deal. But the pain didn't go away and over the next half hour, got worse and became unbearable. We say “unbearable,” but most of us who say “unbearable” bore it somehow, so I guess it was just really intense.

Finally, our leader, Doug Lucas, was summoned to my bedside. He asked me what was wrong. I replied, “I'm dying.” And I really thought I was and I think he really believed me too. I had gone through it all my mind already. I had been a major part of organizing this new venture, and I wasn't even going to make it through the first month. I was going to be a martyr. And I didn't even have any major quotes for future generations to quote about me or to grace the back cover of my biography, which would become standard in missions classes. They would name a dormitory after me at a Bible college.

There were already great quotes from the summer, the best being, “It's cool,” spoken by fellow-intern, Jon Spalding. When things didn't go as planned (and things never go as planned), Jon would nonchalantly say, “It's cool.” But that wasn't my quote.

So after Doug, was summoned to my deathbed, he consulted with Leslie Penhollow, who was on our team and was a nurse and who spoke fluent Spanish. It was decided to take me to the hospital. We got into a cab, Leslie, Jim (her husband) and I.. On the way, the pain moved from my back to my front. And a light went on in my head. I said, “I'm having a kidney stone. The pain just moved.” I don't even know how I knew this. I don't ever remember knowing anything about kidney stones.

Well, at least I wasn't going to die.

Leslie confirmed that it sounded like that was what I was happening. Jim confirmed that he had had them before and it sounded like I might not be dying after all.

We got to the hospital. And though my Spanish was pretty good for two years in high school and a month-long crash course in Costa Rica and having listened to tapes of Venezuelan Spanish for almost a year (“Al pasarse la esponga el jabon hace burbujas.”) my hospital Spanish was just not there.

The rest is a blur. They put me on IV liquid and pain killer and in a short while, say, fewer than three hours, the stone had passed and they sent me home. They sent me with pain killer in case it happened again. But they didn't send me with a nice bottle of pills, no. They sent me with syringes and vials of liquid to inject myself with painkiller. I never had to use them and I'm not sure what I would have done had I needed to. Leslie showed how to do it and had me practice on an orange. But I knew that I was not an orange and having always hated shots, I probably was incapable of shooting up. The other option was that I could go to a pharmacy and someone there would inject me.

On this internship, we pretty much did everything by twos. So the next day as everyone went out to pass out brochures about our upcoming evangelistic campaign, “Cruzada de la Familia.” The telephone number of the house was on the brochure so it was decided that someone should always stay at the house if anyone called with questions such as, “Which La Fundación is that?” Not that I would have understood the question nor would I have been able to give a decent answer. Since I had been under the weather, I was elected to stay back that day to man the phone and since were doing things by twos, someone had to stay with me. The person who got the job that day said, “I came here to save souls not to babysit.” He actually said that.

I realized that back in May, a few weeks before I left for Latin America, I had had a kidney stone on a Saturday night at my parents' house. I had terrible back pain and my mother had some kind of pain killer for something or the other and had given it to me and I must have passed the stone in my sleep. Now that I'm practically an expert, it makes sense. Almost all of my stones have come in pairs. The first one must have been a chip off the old block. The other one hung around to give me this wonderful memory.

And for the record, that guy did get to save souls later. Or at least he want back there as a missionary for several years. I'm not sure how many souls he saved. And I guess we'll never know how many were lost because he got stuck babysitting me.