My Wife's Kidney Stone Adventure

[Aragorn243]

Update on the Mrs. I'm taking her to the hospital again today for what we count as her 5th surgery to remove a large kidney stone.

We are in an argument with the surgeon who is insisting that she has not had 4 surgeries and this one isn't a surgery either.

Now, he claims that doctors count surgeries in a different way and he can see how a layman might count them differently.

My way of counting. You take a scapple and cut into someone's side and then kidney. That's a surgery. His way of counting, that is not a surgery. Go figure. He's only counting the attempts to actually remove the stone, so that's one at this point.

Surgery 1 - insert tube into kidney
Surgery 2 - attempt to break up and remove stone, discover tube is in wrong place, attempt to move tube, abort all attempts
Surgery 3 - insert tube into kidney
Surgery 4 - replace small tube with larger tube and break up and remove portion of stone
Surgery 5 (today) remove tube, insert stent.

How do YOU count.

She's had this second, large tube in for a week when the could have removed it at the end of surgery 4. They claim they didn't know if they would need to use it again or not which could be true but they did take a CT scan and kept her in the hospital for an extra day to review everything just in case and we were told it would be used again this Friday, tomorrow.

Now it is a stent and laser through the urethra. Less invasive so better they say and I tend to agree but why leave the damn tube in for an extra week.

Many friends are advising us to lawyer up, my wife's fully on board, I'm starting to move in that direction, at least with the guy that put the tube in wrong the first time. No one can figure out how that happened, he did it in a radiology lab with all the necessary scans while inserting it.

She's missed two weeks of work for a two-day procedure that was to have an additional 2-3 days rest, I've missed 5 days for the surgeries and taking care of her when she's obviously not able to take care of herself.

Getting tired of this.