the day my body broke

I have had a terrible 24 hours, and I didn't even go to anything to do with the G20 protests.

It started last night. There is a squat called The Wake. It was set up as a place for like minded lovers of liberty to hangout, practice solidarity and provide a place for anarchists to live. A busload of an estimated 50 police turned up last evening (we're guessing because of the G20, though the space actually had little to do with it) and turfed everyone out. So my night was spent hastily packing the meagre belongings of the squatters, all the while being flanked by many, many pigs muttering insults and patting each other on the back for evicting the otherwise-homeless.

Cue the morning. I woke up with extraordinary back pain. I've never really been susceptible to sore backs, but this was a doozy. I figured it was from all of the hurried and repetitive lifting. The pain increased dramatically. I went to the toilet and suddenly I was in total fucking agony. As in uncontrollable moaning.

I was asked if I needed to go to the doctor. I thought maybe if I lay down awhile, it would all be okay. It wasn't. I began to writhe. I knew there was something terribly wrong. I stood up and knew I had to get to the hospital.

I should break this narrative by explaining I rarely get sick, and when I do it's usually not that bad (severe colds and the like). So from my perspective, if I decide I need to go to the hospital, it must be serious.

I announced, between groans, that I needed to go to the hospital, not the doctor. My housemates and our anarchist guests decided that this was the cue to form an ad hoc committee and decide whether I really needed to go or not. Maybe, they said, I just needed to go see a doctor. Yes, they decided, they would take me to a doctor instead. Apparently me vomiting because of the pain wasn't enough of a counter argument, and more debate time was needed.

I felt like I was in Bizarro World. No-one could understand that this was more than just a sore back and that I was in more pain than I had even been before. Finally, my friend G was convinced, thanks to the urgent prompting of my boyfriend, that we should at least get in her van and start to drive.

Then there was a slow meandering through the merits of which hospital I should go to if I decided that I really trulydidn't need to go to a Medical Centre to see a doctor. After what seemed like a age had past, we had only travelled a short distance down Sydney Road. Traffic was hell.

Literally, I was lying in the back of the van, screaming and crying with pain. Swear-word mantras were being spontaneously chanted between my gritted teeth. It was as if the combined shitness and unfunniness of every episode Birds of a Feather were playing in the middle of my back. We pulled up. We weren't at a hospital, we were at a doctor's office. Once again I was asked if I was sure I didn't want to see a doctor. Once again, I stated that I desperately needed to go to a fucking hospital, and there weren't any other ways I could think of expressing that need. Hospital. You. Drive. Fast. Doctors. There. Nurses. Too.

By this stage I was sobbing and writhing more. To drop another pop-culture reference, it was alot like the belly-shot scene in Reservoir Dogs. I drifted in and out of consciousness.

The next thing I know, I was at a hospital, in a wheelchair, vomiting into a device that looked like a large condom. Have you ever been in so much pain your body starts to expel all it can? Wasn't great. I was making a lot of noise, screaming in pain. When I tried to stop myself, I made very odd, sometimes high-pitched growling noises. I opted for the more civilised swear-words.

A woman in the emergency room was also after some immediate attention, though in hindsight I suspect didn't need it as much as I did. She began imitating my wails and proclaimed she also had the same pain. Some guy told her to shut-the-fuck-up. And I was wheeled through after some delightfully brief and concise questions.

I can't describe the pain accurately. It was like being stabbed by a log on a cold day. I couldn't stop making noise and crying. It was horrible being so out of control of my responses. I tried doing a Gaius Baltar trick (as seen in Battlestar Galactica e03s07) and leaving my body etc. No dice, didn't work. I was given a dose of morphine and the intensity of the pain began to subside. That's not to say it went away, but I was no longer freaking out the little kids in the ward, and the man in the cubicle next to mine (I could see him through the curtain) stooped clutching the sides of his head like he was trying to block out memories of the Holocaust.

This time was used to regroup and more examination was done. An x-ray was performed. I decided to try to urinate in this time of calm. A couple of failed attempts (stage fright is a bitch) forced me to go to one of the bathrooms, clutching my saline drip and a bottle to catch my piss in.

Success! But my pee was brown - it was riddled with blood. Not good. I clambered up onto the trolley and the pain began to mount again. Soon I was back at the same threshold. Total, hardcore, agony.

The nurse asked me to rate my pain out of ten. "Tell her ten!" my mind yelled, but then I thought about those Iraqi beheading videos and I figured that ten needed to be reserved for something more extraordinary.

"Nine! Aaaarrk! Fuck. Oh my god! Shit! Fuck! (sob sob) Nine!" I replied to the nurse.
More morphine was administered. Then more. Then more still. It all had no effect. I was clutching at the air, clutching my boyfriend and begging the staff to knock me unconscious. My arms and legs felt delicious, but that core of pain in my back was just as strong.

I was given a suppository with another kind of opiate. Time for another quick break in narrative. Part of my fear of doctors and hospitals is of invasive examination. When the nurse looked at me sheepishly and said, "I'm going to have to use a suppository, but it should really help with your pain," without skipping a beat I replied "I don't give a fuck! Aaarrrghhh! Fuck", I dropped my dacks and up it went. No biggie.

I went into shock and my temperature dropped and I was shuddering uncontrollably. They administered Diazepam and it didn't work either. Didn't they understand that... Oh wait, it totally did work and I woke up in another ward with an oxygen mask on, feeling relatively peachy.

"We think we gave you too much morphine," said one of the seemingly-endless line of nice nurses. "o rly?" I said. Opiates make me l337 speak. "I think you gave me juuuust enough. OMG LOL WTF."

I'm calling bullshit on morphine though. I didn't feel high, or happy, or anything. I just felt a pleasant disassociation from pain and very nauseous.

Turns out I had kidney stones. Every nurse told me, in turn, that the pain is comparable to childbirth, though one said that kidney stones were worse.

What was amazing was that the pain disappeared rapidly and now, twelve hours later, I'm home, eating chocolate and blogging. I think the stone might be in my bladder, because no rocks have passed my pee hole, although they could be too small to notice.

Here are some snaps of my adventure, although none are of my weeping like a child.

Here is me still in a haze and all freaked out.

Here is me showing off the thing the put one of the many drips (three all told) in. I'm also trying to pose like its a glamour photography shot and I'm hiding my double-chin.

Here's me pretending it's 2000 and I'm flashing the
"Shocker" hand sign. But I got one in the stink only.

This is me giving the thumbs up, assuring all Dole Diary
readers I'm okay, but would still appreciate presents.

PS All the friends who helped me were awesome. I'm just using a bit of dramatic license. And all the staff at St Vincent's Hospital were fantastic. I was seriously impressed with how great they were.