So what is a stent?
My tumour causes pressure on the tubes between my kidneys and my bladder. When these tubes get squashed urine cannot escape my kidneys. My kidneys inflate like balloons, and start to fail, toxins build up in my blood stream, I feel nauseous and keep throwing up, I start dying.
Luckily for me modern medicine has a little trick to stave off this outcome for a while. It is both very subtle and very crude. My ureters get squashed? Let’s put some scaffolding in!
A ureter is your body’s tube from the kidney to the bladder, as distinct from the urethra, which is the tube from your bladder to the outside that you pee through.
To stop my ureters getting squashed I have something called a stent inserted. Stents come in lots of sizes for different purposes, basically they are a bit of hose for keeping tubes held open. Depending on size you can have one in your heart to hold open an artery, or a big one in your gullet to stop your food pipe getting squashed so you can eat, or one in your airway to stop you suffocating. Anywhere in your body a tube you need to function is getting squashed, chances are you might have a stent inserted to hold it open.
My particular type of stent sits in the ureters between my kidney and bladder, I have two of them, one on each side. If you can imagine a very thin bit of hose, as slim as the plastic string that your strimmer uses to cut the grass, and with little holes along the length like one of those automatic watering hoses. Also curly like the strimmer plastic string so that if you cut off about eight inches you get a loose curl each end. That’s pretty much the kind of stent they use to hold open a ureter. When it has been threaded through the ureter one curl of stent rests in the kidney and the other curl in the bladder so that the stent doesn’t slide out of place.
Friction from the curly stent ends hanging into my bladder are one reason my catheter balloons have a tendency to explode on me. That’s another topic.
First time my kidneys failed they had to punch holes in my back on each side to let the urine out (nephrostomy tubes, urine bags yada yada). After a week or so when the doctors were happy that the balance of electrolytes in my blood was no longer poisoning me, they inserted the stents as a longer tern solution. They put me under an x-ray machine, gave me some pethidine and I babbled nonsense while they threaded the stents in through the holes in my back. Problem solved.
Of course human bodies being the messy gooey places that they are, problems don’t stay fixed. Urine is not pure distilled water, salts and debris build up over time, so approximately every six months I need a new set of stents.
Usually, if there are no other problems and I am well enough to tolerate anaesthetic, they knock me out, push a camera on a tube up my urethra and thread the stents in from below. I usually wake up slightly sore, but not so much that a couple of co-codamol can’t zap the pain. Also rather thankful that I happen to be female.
If I get a kidney infection the stents can block up. Blockages cause the salt balances and levels of protein in my blood to go haywire, which usually make me too ill for a general anaesthetic, so then they have to go punch a hole in my back again.
I had a couple of infections in September resulting in a blocked stent, having a drain in my back for a few weeks brought down the levels of toxins in my blood. By the time they came to replace the stent my ureter had contracted and the replacement from above through the nephrostomy hole under local anaesthetic was agonising to the extent that the surgeon gave up and put in a narrower stent. That failed also (So back in with the nephrostomy tube). An attempt at threading the stent up from my bladder in January couldn’t get past the obstruction.
A fortnight ago they had another attempt at threading in the stent. This time down through the nephrostomy again. Not quite so painful this time, though I’m sure the x-ray theatre nurse had some nice bruises on her hand afterwards. With the help of a magic balloon inflated inside my ureter a full size stent was inserted.
As I type this I have just got back from having the nephrostomy cap removed (they left it in place as a precaution in case I needed kidney draining if the operation had failed).
As soon as the nephrostomy wound is healed enough for the dressing to come off I am going to have the longest, hottest shower there ever was.
Read other posts in Val’s diary here:
2 June 2010 – Hooray for corsets
3 March 2010 – It’s your funeral
10 February 2010 – A nice cup of tea
3 February 2010 – The joys of negative thinking
26 January 2010 – My secret tattoos
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part II)
20 January 2010 – Plumbing problems (part I)
6 January 2010 – Of vampires and vaccinations
29 December 2009 – Beauty and fashion
