That's most of the story. I'll speed this up now. The pain was mostly gone. An hour or so later pangs of pain started to return. Five second twinges here and there. No big deal. My blood pressure returned to 120 over 80. They had me provide a urine sample. Fortunately, I was able to give them a little. I wouldn't have been able to earlier. They gave me a CT scan. Kind of cool. They injected me with something that made me feel like I'd just downed a hot coffee. I could feel heat radiating down my body. The whole scan lasted a couple of minutes. Oh, most of you are older than me. You've probably had one. But it was my first.
I'm tempted to let you guess the result, but here it is: Blood in my urine and "multiple small left distal ureteral calculi associated with a mild obstructive uropathy." In English, that means kidney stones. And Judas Priest, if this is a "mild" case and what I've got are small, what must a bad case be like???
Maybe I'll let you know one day. The doc tells me it will probably recur. Oh, joy.
The pain, by the way, may be the stones working their way toward the bladder, or it may be muscle spasms. I'm leaning toward the latter. Either way, it was awful.
They gave me a glorified flour sifter to pee in so I can catch the kidney stones. It'll probably cost the insurance company $100. At 3:00, they sent me home. I had things to do in preparation for our vacation on Friday, so it's been a couple more hours and I took care of those things and then sat down to write this up. I'm still having twinges of pain... nowhere near as bad, though.
When I get back from vacation in two weeks, I need to find both a family care physician and a urologist. My brother has a particularly nasty disease whose name escapes me... but it causes kidney stones, joint damage, benign tumors all over the body, and about twenty different kinds of dangerous illnesses. He's only a little older than me and has been dealing with it for more than a decade. I guess I better find out if I have it too. 
Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months
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