Desperately seeking affordable health care for all

At 1 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, I was abruptly awakened by a pain that ripped across the lower left side of my back, as if I had been stabbed with a jagged-edged knife. I downed bread and Advil, took a hot shower and bath and applied a heating pad and pain-relief cream. Nothing helped.

Within two hours I was exhausted, but I could sleep little. I dozed off for five or 10 minutes at a time, only to awake to the pain.

I drop my kids off at school each morning. I wondered how I would get them there. My wife, Katerina, took the day off from work and took them to school. Then, at around 9:30 a.m., I declared that I could no longer take the pain. I had to go to the emergency room.

Katerina rushed me to South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside. The good doctors and nurses there administered a powerful pain medication and gave me a CT scan. Within a half-hour, they had diagnosed my ailment –– a kidney stone measuring five millimeters by three millimeters that had lodged in my bladder.

I left four hours later, tired, frazzled, but feeling no pain. I was told to drink a lot of water, see a urologist and hope that the kidney stone would pass on its own. Otherwise I would need a procedure called lithotripsy, in which sound waves are beamed through your body while you’re under anesthesia to smash the stone into granules that are easily flushed out of the urinary system. I was also given a pain-medication prescription, which, thankfully, I didn’t need. After downing what seemed like a pool’s worth of water, I excreted the stone two days later.

Here I must give a shout-out to the medical staff at South Nassau’s ER. Whenever I’ve needed them over the years, I’ve received nothing but first-rate care, so thank you.