October 28, 2002

And now I bring you a report from the weekend of October 25-27, known around campus as “Homecoming Weekend,” sponsored by the Marquis de Sade.

You see, despite the fact that Homecoming Weekend was loaded with many fun and interesting things to do, such as barbecues, football games, overcrowded church services and very happy, smiling musicals with sexually suggestive titles, I looked forward to the weekend mostly because it would give me a chance to “be productive.”

Now, usually when I say “be productive,” I am actually using the codeword for “take a nap,” but this weekend I really needed to be productive, in the sense of the word that the truly honest people in America (all five of them) use when they say it. This is because STRESS is looming over the horizon like a giant hydrogen-filled dirigible labeled “STRESS” that is scheduled to collide with a radio tower on November 22, when absolutely every major project in each of my classes is due.

This is because November 22 is the last day of class before Thanksgiving Week, and thus, my professors feel they are being charitable by not ruining our holiday weekend. I would thank them for that, except for the part where I'm not grateful whatsoever.

But I am capable of great acts of responsibility if I put my mind to it, so I decided I would really, seriously, get started on some of these projects over Homecoming Weekend, excessive out-of-state traffic or no. I had several projects to pick from – two papers for my honors class on extremely vague topics such as “Is Anything Really There?”, an English research project whose grading rubric is a better kept secret than most critical national security information, a project for artificial intelligence that could be either fun or impossible, and also a website for Youth Corps that I volunteered to do as a result of my complete insanity.

However, I did not count on having three tests and a project due this week, all of them on Wednesday, so I supposed then that the big four would just have to wait patiently until I had finished my most pressing matters.

Unfortunately, Friday morning some higher being with a terrific sense of irony decided it would be really funny if I came down with some painful malady, such as kidney stones, thus preventing me from doing anything save roll around and clutch my abdomen and maybe moan pitifully.

So, needless to say, that was how I spent my Friday morning. I've had abdominal pains before of the same nature, and they typically go away after a little bit. But this time, the pain didn't go away. It just kept getting worse. I had no idea what might have been causing it, as every time I'd gone to the doctor about my mysterious abdominal pain they never diagnosed anything very firmly.

“If it was a kidney stone, Chris,” they would tell me, “you would be screaming in agony and wishing you were in hell because it's probably more fun. You just look vaguely uncomfortable.”

So because it was never in the right place to be appendicitis, they would just say “you'll get over it,” prescribe an antibiotic and send me on my way.

I wasn't really sure what to do Friday morning. Nothing I did seemed to alleviate the pain – rolling around on the bed, sitting, walking around, bending, stretching, eating Oreos – it was all useless. So I figured, since I'm going to be miserable no matter what I do, I might as well just go to class. That's right. I went to class with a kidney stone. It is very hard to pass a kidney stone and be logical at the same time.

So there I am, in American Literature class, the girl sitting next to me giving me a loud, smiling “Good morning, Chris!” and me just kind of rocking and grimacing painfully, trying desperately to look like I'm glad to be there. So while the professor lectured on and on, I would squirm in my desk with this look on my face that must have suggested that I was extremely interested in the lecture because the professor kept looking at me and addressing his remarks to me. I don't know – is torturous pain the reaction most professors are looking for when they lecture?

When Spanish class rolled around, I finally came to my senses and fled to the dorm. When the pain failed to subside after several hours and all the Advil Gelcaps I could legally take and maybe one more, I called the nurse's office to ask what I should do.

The lady at the nurse's office recommended that I come see the nurse at the office. She said this with a kind of annoyed voice, as if to question how I dare ask for medical advice over the phone, when the nurse's office is a convenient 76,000,000 miles from Cone Dorm and my level of personal pain hadn't quite reached “knife wound” levels yet. I had a flash of anger when I heard this, but I didn't let myself say anything. Instead, I turned on my “pathetic mode.” You see, when I'm sick, I have only two possible moods – really mean and sarcastic, or incredibly self-pitying. I decided that in this case, the latter was the more diplomatic choice, and so I meekly said “ok” and walked across the entirety of Harding campus to the nurse's office, only to discover that the whole population of Cathcart Hall was apparently in line ahead of me to see the nurse. I signed the paper and waited, squirming, in the couch, until the nurse called me, by which time I had heard about as much as I could take of a locally televised bluegrass band.

The nurse asked me many calm and collected questions, trying to decide what was causing my discomfort, when all I really cared about at the time was ending the discomfort. She suggested I go to a doctor. I made a mental note – going to the school nurse never helps anything.

Anyway, I did end up seeing the doctor after a very long and miserable wait, and receiving a pain shot, which made me quite happy, as well as loopy. I filled a prescription at the pharmacy for the first time since I've left home, purchasing medication worth a sum total of approximately $879.56, which I naturally put on my parent's credit card.

Saturday, though, I had my roommate take me to the ER, because the little red pills intended to stifle the pain weren't working at all, and I wasn't ready to spend the entire weekend the same way I had spent Friday. The ER experience was kind of neat, what with the IV and the wheelchair and the big X-ray machine, although it did take over five hours, the entirety of which my roommate spent in the waiting room with a book from the Otherland series. The Otherland series is a very good choice for excessive waiting periods because each chapter is maybe 9,000 pages long. Nonetheless, I felt guilty for being the cause of what must have been intense boredom on his part, while I was in a darkened room enjoying anti-inflammatory medication intravenously.

But I'm glad I went to the ER nonetheless, because I can now say quite definitively that I had a kidney stone, not a very large one, but a kidney stone nonetheless. So it's not gas, it's not a strained abdominal muscle, it's a kidney stone, dang it! So stop looking at me like I'm making this up! Errghhh ... ok, I'm better now. Mmm ... codeine's kicking in... that's the stuff...

I now also have the extreme privilege of getting to “filter” my urine, meaning I have to pee through a funnel with a piece of mesh on the end, so that when the stone comes, I can bring in to the doctor's office for analysis, or maybe fashion a piece of jewelry out of it. However, peeing through a filter isn't quite as fun as it might, at first, appear. As a direct result of attending a high school where the bathrooms were locked 24 hours a day for “security reasons,” I have learned to not go to the bathroom until I absolutely have to, meaning that when I urinate, it comes out at forces nearing that of a fire hose. This means that, when the stream hits the filter, instead of trickling merrily through the mesh, it rebounds violently against the walls of the bathroom, so that I have had to learn to hold off the pressure. It now takes me minutes to pee where it used to take nanoseconds.

Still, at least the worst of it seems to be over, and I can finally get started being productive. But I'd rather write C-Files.