What a Kidney Stone Taught Me About Relationships

What could a kidney stone possibly teach us about relationships? More than I ever would have expected if you had asked me a month ago. In this episode, I share a few surprising lessons that came from the most difficult (and most recent) medical experience of my life. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back or welcome to the Secure Leader Podcast. My name is CT, and I'll help you understand why you love the way you do. I know this episode title might sound a bit strange. What does a kidney stone have to do with relationships? I'll tell you right here, right now, on this episode. Before I dive into a couple lessons that I've learned over the last month, let me back up to the beginning and tell you a little bit of this story. I do have a family history with kidney stones. I've never gotten one myself until about a month ago. Find myself in the ER on a random Tuesday night about 11 p.m. And after a couple hours, I was told that I have a five millimeter kidney stone. I have no idea, is that big or small. At that point in time in the grand scheme of kidney stones, seemed kind of uh medium, I guess is like the way that now I understand it. This seems kind of a you might pass it, you might not. A couple days later, the pain wasn't going away. So I saw the urologist who said that we need to do surgery to remove it. The following week, went into surgery. Thank the world, thank the Lord, thank the universe that the World Cup was on uh because that helped me to get through this uh during the day. I'm usually working and doing other things that I'm not watching TV or not really big into TV shows. So like what the heck do I do during the day? So thankfully I have a beautiful game to comfort me and watch and kind of pass the time as I was going between okay, I have the kidney stone, am I gonna pass it? Am I not? I don't need the surgery, and then I had that for a week before a stint was put in during the procedure, so then I had that for a week, and so it's like a whole thing. This has been the most crazy, insane medical month of my life, and it's not even close. That literally was the first time that I went to the ER, I think like ever, or maybe once before, when I was pretty young, but uh definitely the first time by myself. So it was quite the experience. I will tell you, I this I wasn't actually planning to talk about this, but I'm gonna actually say this as the number one lesson is that even in the midst of chaos, you can call it, or turmoil, or uncertainty, or whatever fear, whatever whatever the phrase uh you want to say, like when I am was in that situation, as not fun as that was, I was able to bring uh level levity and laughter, laughter, I think there's some of the experiences, um, to the nurses or the doctors, and like being able to have that kind of playful back and forth, which I've talked about on numerous episodes, like that is very important to me in a relationship. I need that, I know that. But to see myself be able to do that in to be able to create that in you know, a medical arena, in a in a space that really, you know, is supposed to be more serious uh and all of that. And obviously they're dealing with life and death and even things that are way more serious than what I went through. But to be able to uh yeah, to be able to bring that levity and that laughter, I enjoyed that. I'll give you one one quick story around that. I was getting prepped to get the stint removed, so they're taking my vitals and different things to just prep me to have that done. The doctor came in to just give a quick overview, and I was signing some consent forms. He's about to leave the room, he's he's like walking away, so his back is turned to me, and I'm just like, hey doc, I hope I never have to see you again for a really, really, really long time. And he starts he just starts dying laughing. He's like, Well, I'm gonna see you in like five minutes. And I'm like, I know, I know. I mean like after that, and so just that was just one of the funny um stories. I definitely have more of a dry sense of humor, and so I enjoy uh yeah, I enjoyed that. And and uh really, really cool doc. I appreciate him. Another lesson that I learned is that pain clarifies priorities. When you're in physical pain, your your world gets small. You're not thinking about Instagram, you're not thinking about work, you're not thinking about whether someone texted you back in three hours. You're really just thinking, I just want to feel okay again, and I'll do whatever I need to do to feel bad. It's you know, you're you're kind of like conserving your your energy, or maybe put in another way, it's just like your energy is being pushed into that area, you know, to into that area of like, I want to feel better, and all the kind of external noise fades away. And even in a in an example of this, is sometimes I'll have lower back pain. And in this situation, then that got totally cut off because I was worried about the kidney stone pain, which was in a different area. And it's sort of like the idea if say you like stubbed your toe and like jammed your finger at the same time, you're really only gonna feel pain in one spot. You're gonna be focused on one particular area more than another. We see the people on social media with the cars and the houses and the all the materialistic things, and none of that matters, you know? Like it doesn't matter. And that in those moments didn't matter if I was living in a 500 square foot shack or a 5,000 or 50,000 square foot mansion, whatever, like none of that stuff matters. So the thing, I guess maybe it put it, maybe this is what I said is like the things that really matter, that truly matter, come to the surface in times like this. Another lesson was you learn very quickly when you're in a medical emergency type situation who your true friends are and who really shows up for you. Why I'm laughing there is I had somebody text me one of the first nights of the World Cup, and he was like, uh it was somebody that I just know in a very service level way, and he texted me, said, Hey, are you doing anything tonight? And I said, No, because I think I had just gotten back from the ER like the the day before or something, so it was like it was very fresh. I was like, no, because I have a kidney stone and all he responded with was a thumbs up emoji, which to me was like the I guess on one hand wasn't surprising based on the connection, you know, wasn't very deep necessarily. But on the other hand, that is like the last thing that I would want somebody to if if I if the roles were reversed and somebody said it's to me, that's like the last thing that I would be responding with. Kind of hilarious, but then sad at the same time, like just zero uh zero like empathy, right? You know? So there are different situations like that, who checked in or didn't, or who came to surprise me or didn't. It's not about me. I'm not asking people to drop whatever they're doing for me. I'm not asking in that moment, I wasn't I really wasn't asking for anything specific. Like literally, I would just want somebody to be there with me just to sit here and hang out and take my mind off the craziness that's going on. You know, that's not a grand gesture that doesn't really take a lot of effort. That to me is just human decency. So it just so definitely having the kidney stone brought to light some of that, and who who naturally stepped forward and was present in those moments and who faded away and kind of showed, I guess, their true colors. Also, I would say that when that is shown in this type of situation, it really just speeds it up because you probably would have gotten to that conclusion that that person wasn't really for you, or wasn't true or genuine in the connection, or didn't value the connection as much as you did. But having this kind of experience then just compounds it, kind of puts it on hyperspeed to show you who's really uh gonna be there for you. And I would say, lastly, give you three lessons here. The last one is that you simply just can't control everything. So I I like solving problems. I think a lot of us probably do. But, you know, this one isn't one I could uh work. Sure, you can chat GPT, whatever, um, talk to relatives or friends or strangers on the internet that have also gone through something similar, but at the end of the day, there's just very little that you can actually control in the situation. Following the doctor's advice, drinking a lot of water, taking the medication, and then you're really just sitting there waiting to have the surgery and kind of get back to normal. Maybe in a way we can relate this to relationships in that we try to spend so much energy to control the outcomes when what we actually need is just information. We can't force the attraction, the readiness, the emotional availability. We actually need to wait to see if that is something that they can give. There really isn't a timeline for that. Thank you for letting me talk about that, vent a little bit, about my procedure and everything over the last month. It's quite quite the interesting ordeal. Hopefully, this episode was helpful, useful, and maybe even shifted a perspective or brought something to light that you may not have thought about before. I would love to hear from you. You can reach me via fan mail, you can put the link in the show notes, email me directly, or reach out on social. Have you ever gone through a health scare, emergency, anything of that sort, and has it brought clarity to your connections and relationships? I would love to know. Until next time, take care, we'll talk soon.