Do kidney stones hurt more than labor?

(last year part 2)(leaving the hood)

While I was still physically and emotionally recovering from my miscarriage and d&c, I started having pain in my right "waist", as I call it. You know the place where your hand sits when you put your hands on your waist? Thumb in back, fingers in front? That's where it hurt. And that's kidney stone pain.

And my answer to whether kidney stones hurt worse than labor is yes. I feel that I cannot adequately describe kidney stone pain without cussing. It is Jesus-take-me-now pain.

I have had kidney stones pass before. And I have known for years that I have kidney stones hanging out in my kidneys, some too big to pass. But as long as I stay hydrated, they don't move and therefore, don't hurt.

But during the time I was in the hospital, waiting to see whether I needed a d&c, I was required to not have any food or drink, in case I needed surgery. And that was probably my undoing.

Since I hadn't had trouble for years, I didn't have a urologist. It took a few days to get in to one, and then to schedule a lithotripsy procedure, needed because this stone was 11 millimeters, too big to pass.

On the morning my husband and I left for the hospital, we discovered that the back of our garage, behind the big 15 packer van, was full of tiny black glass shards, and that one of the back windows was gone.

Hmmm, we said.

We spent the day (while waiting for prep and anesthesia, etc) pondering whether Chevy van windows ever just explode and shatter, was it really hot enough in the garage ... but when we came home, we looked around a little more and found tiny holes in the garage door. Bullet holes.

We have lived in the hood for 14 years. North city. The only white people on our block. We lived there through the Michael Brown shooting and response. Those have been our people. And we were theirs. One lady from our hood, Lena, used to come over and eat leftover pizza some mornings, with syrup. When someone asked her why she always came over to 'those white peoples' house', she paid us the compliment of a lifetime. "They not white. They niggas like us." *love*

Our time there was not without mishap. A bench stolen. Garage broken into multiple times. Ladder, bike, mower, broken weed wacker. Friend's car taken for a joy ride, but then abandoned, in our yard, still in gear, moving toward the house. (I ran, several months pregnant, jumped in and stopped the car - one of my more super moments)

We were blessed to have wonderful neighbors. Really great, loving, beautiful people. We also encountered folks with significant issues: druggies, homeless, a prostitute or 2, and a neighborhood drunk named Big Mike (not actually a big man), who called me Mom and said my husband and I were his best friends. He frequently came over needing a ride up the block to his house. Let's be clear - those are not problems unique to a certain skin color. But in our part of town, we had more than our share of those issues.

Still, we felt called to be there and honestly didn't ever see ourselves leaving. Even after one of my neighborhood girls was brutally murdered within site of our door, I didn't think we would ever move away.

Until the gunshots in the garage, my van window shot out, one of the bullets found in my baby's car seat. And we felt like God said, get ready to move.