Kidney Stones

[steveprichard]

I want to relay my nightmare in hopes of helping others.
Within an hour of waking up from a PREPAID lithotripsy procedure last month, a nurse removed my stint per instructions from the surgeon over the telephone. I had complained of pain of 8 on a scale of 10. The doctor said my stone was so small that the pain I was feeling was probably the stint, and so he had the nurse remove it. She had never removed a stint tube before, but did just fine. Within a few minutes of the stint removal I had pain of scale 12 and began vomiting. I was put into a room for the night and given morphine. The next morning the doctor admitted that he should not have pulled the stint, that he should have left it in for at least a couple of days, and would schedule to put it back in as quickly as possible, and of course WOULD NOT charge me for his mistake. Loaded with morphine, I was feeling pain of 6 or less and was released from the hospital. About 12 hours later I had to call an ambulance to take me back to the hospital, where I was put back into a room and hooked up to morphine again. The next day I had another IVP and CT scan which confirmed a blocked ureter with several crushed stones still in the kidney. The stint was put back in the next day and I was released from the hospital. Two days later I had the stint removed in the doctors office with no problems. I went home and ate a nice lunch and passed two stones within a couple of hours. I began to think my nightmare was over, but 6 hours later I began to vomit violently. I called a neighbor to take me to a different hospital because I had lost any confidence in the first hospital. I had picked up a stomach virus and after some meds through an IV and orally, I felt much better.
A week later I received a bill from the first hospital for $25,985.62. I was never told while in the hospital that when I came back via the ambulance that I was starting a new procedure. I was shocked because the doctor led me to believe that this was part of the original PREPAID procedure. Since I am self-employed with no insurance I thought I had done everything right by checking on prices and prepaying everything, but that's not the way it turned out.
My advice to everyone is to never let anyone remove a stint just 3 hours after putting it in. If your urologist is Dr. John Saba of Odessa, Texas, and you are scheduled to enter Odessa Regional Medical Center in Odessa, Texas, for any procedure, DON"T! This hopital is not accredited with the BBB, so I can't even file a complaint about the way I was treated. But I will spend all my free time writing to forums, like this one, and other local blogs and newspapers warning people to stay away from them. I would think that I would have some recourse against a doctor and a hospital that sent me home with a blocked ureter and no stint, but I'm screwed, although the doctor did admit his error and didn't charge me any extra fees. Mighty big of him, but I'll never use him again. That damned kidney stone has cost me a total of roughly 35 thousand dollars and 8 days of intense hell, not counting the year and a half when the symptons of bleeding and back pain first appeared.
As for stint removal without medication, take very deep breaths and exhale while they are pulling it out. Piece of cake.