Oh. My.

I had a rough weekend, pain-wise, so I called my doctor this morning and asked if he would take my stent out early. And he said yes! So I made my way to his office, excited to get this foreign object out of my body, but nervous about how much the removal process would hurt.

I am not even kidding you when I say the apparatus he used to retrieve the stent was 2.5 feet long. It was a long piece of flexible metal with a light and a camera and some sort of clamp on the end. He inserted this thing, and after a minute or two, took out a TEN INCH plastic tube that looked like this:



THAT was in my abdomen! No wonder I was so uncomfortable. In case you are wondering, this is what it looked like while inside my body:



I'm still in pain, but it is more of a bruised feeling than a I-have-a-TEN-INCH-LONG-foreign-object-in-me feeling. I am glad healing can begin now. I go back in a month for a check up and the results of an extended urine test and the analysis of my kidney stones. Supposedly they will be able to tell what is causing the stones.

Until then, I'll be drinking water. A lot. And you should too.