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“There’s a Diamonique special on at two that lasts the
whole afternoon
! Maybe we can get matching earrings and a pendant set!”
    For six days I was confined to my kidney stone prison, eating tapioca pudding, taking drugs, and staring into the toilet after almost every visit.
    When six days had come and gone, my doctor finally decided I needed surgery immediately, but passed it off to his partner since he was going on vacation for a week.
    Nervous about slicing open the kidney of a patient that he had never seen before, my doctor’s partner called my mother and told her about his unease.
    “This is what I propose,” he said. “I’ll prescribe Dilaudid for the pain, have Laurie drink as much water as humanly possible and lie with a heating pad around her side. If the stones don’t pass over the weekend, we’ll operate on Monday.”
    Three hours later, after drinking more water than the state of Arizona is allotted in a whole season and lying on the heating pad, I gathered with my mother and my father in the smallest room in the house. The three of us hadn’t made a joint appearance in the bathroom since my whole family gathered around the bowl after my little sister swallowed a bicentennial quarter.
    “Is that them?” my mother said, pointing.
    “I guess,” I said, shrugging.
    “That’s it? That’s what they call a
stone
?” my mother asked. “That’s what we’ve been waiting for? I expected a cashew, maybe a macadamia-nut-sized thing. A malted milk ball would have been nice. But that? A lentil could dwarf it!”
    “I know,” I said, rather disappointed. “I was expecting a comet. The stones in our Diamonique pendants are bigger than that.”
    “Please,”
my mother said to me with a disgusted look on her face. “If you bought these kidney stones on QVC, you’d get them twice as big for half the price. These are nothing!”
    “I’m a little let down,” my father said with a frown. “I expected more.”
    True, the pair of little stones nestled at the bottom of the bowl were nothing to boast about. But at least I got to go home and eat food of my own choice, and would be able to answer nature’s call without having to scrutinize it.
    And I still had a bottle of painkillers left to boot.
    That, at least, rocked.

         
    A Rolling Stone, Even When
Sober, Is a Difficult Catch

    D id you know that kidney stones are worth their weight in gold?
    Well, of course you do. Apparently, every person in the world knows this but me, judging by the way my doctor was looking at me.
    “You did WHAT with the kidney stones?” he asked for the second time in twenty seconds.
    “I said I flushed them,” I repeated.
    My doctor just stared at me, then shook his head, as if he had just seen me pull my finger out of my nose.
    “Can you tell me why?” he asked.
    “Absolutely.” I nodded. “If something leaves my body, I pretty much figure that my relationship with it has reached the end. Besides, I just got the last in the
Planet of the Apes
action figures on eBay, and there’s no more room on the display shelf for any other collectibles.”
    Now, I wasn’t sure if I needed to set the stage for him, but I should probably explain that the day my kidney stones made an appearance wasn’t exactly a day of joy. After writhing in six days of the most incredible pain known to man, when those stones finally came rolling out, I named one Mick and I named one Keith and then I flushed them good-bye. There was no way I was about to reach into the potty and start pulling things out of it, I mean, there’s no amount of pharmaceuticals that could ever make that seem like a good idea. Besides, I wasn’t about to play with fate! The stones were gone, and the last thing that I wanted to do was keep them around for good measure, there’s danger involved there any way you look at it. I mean, this is MY WORLD we’re talking about, where it is quite feasible that Mick and Keith could have been mistaken for