Kidney stones & Kibuye

3/3/09
I haven’t been keeping up with blogging and so to be honest I don’t really remember what happened on this day – so it probably isn’t worth writing about…

3/4/09
Today, on the other hand, is certainly worth writing about. Gail is doing twice weekly yoga sessions with Josee and Joseph and Anita & I have decided to join in. After an hour of practice early in the morning (which was really great by the way), I went to get ready to shower and started having some lower back pain on the right side. I assumed I had strained a muscle and didn’t think much of it until the intensity of the pain kept increasing to the point that I couldn’t find any comfortable position sitting or standing. I started to realize it wasn’t muscular and quickly took some ibuprofen – unfortunately the strongest pain killer I had available. I got Anita and told her I was in excruciating pain and then started walking around the house hyperventilating and screaming in pain – Josee and Candida clearly thought I was crazy. It was the weirdest sensation but I could NOT stay still for the life of me and felt like my insides were going to explode. Anita called for a car to take me to the hospital but instead about 5 people from the WE-ACTx clinic came to the house including one doctor who promptly checked my eyes for jaundice… after spending about 10 minutes trying to explain that I thought I had a kidney stone, not a gallstone, I just gave up because he kept checking for scleral icterus. Eugene, on the other hand, was convinced I had injured myself doing Yoga and was grilling Gail about what poses she had “made me” do. Basically it was a shit show for over an hour and all I really wanted was pain medication. By the time someone showed up with a vial of indomethacin, I had felt the pain clearly progress lower down and it was radiating into the groin and then all of a sudden, as quickly as it had come, the pain was gone. This pretty much confirmed my self-diagnosis since I assume that was the point that the stone passed from the ureter into the bladder. I think maybe now I should be an obstetrician since I think I can really sympathize with women in labor! I promptly went for an ultrasound which showed some mild hydronephrosis of the right kidney. After consulting with Mardge and a urologist I know at LIJ, I decided to hold off on getting an IVP since I’m skeptical of the contrast here and the radiation dosage of their ancient x-ray machine. I just started drinking loads of water (I think the cause of the stone is likely dehydration since I definitely don’t drink enough water here) and made a plan to see a Cuban urologist that’s working at the private hospital in Kigali in the morning. I’ve been straining my pee and actually caught the stone this evening – it’s only about 3mm… hard to believe something so small caused such excruciating pain!

3/5/09
Got up early to go to King Faycel Hospital to see the Cuban urologist and of course after waiting for over an hour found out she was in meetings all day outside of Kigali and would be in surgery all day Friday. So the ER physician talked to her on the phone and she agreed the IVP was unnecessary and just recommended taking ciprofloxacin (an antibiotic I conveniently already had since it’s the treatment for traveler’s diarrhea as well) until she could see me on Monday morning. So, that’s where I’m at now… still drinking constantly and hoping there are no more stones in the works that are waiting to pass. Mostly just to prove Eugene wrong I saved the stone to show him and hopefully I can have it analyzed to see what kind of stone it is (there are 4 kinds and if it’s not calcium oxalate then there’s likely a cause other than dehydration or diet that I’ll need to get checked out once I’m back in NY). Also to prove Eugene wrong, I jumped back on the Yoga bandwagon and had a really nice evening practice with Gail and Anita. It’s quite luxurious to have our own private yoga sessions – I think I’m going to have to start taking classes once I’m back home because I’m really enjoying it.

3/6/09
After another morning yoga practice with Josee and Joseph, I thankfully didn’t knock loose any more stones and Anita and I set off to run a bunch of errands. I finally managed to get a hold of the mailbox key and checked for letters/packages – have been expecting something from my aunt and cousin in Toronto but nothing yet sadly. I did get a nice note from my grandparents and from Eunice though – thanks! Anita and I looked into the cost of plane tickets for the trip were planning to Tanzania and Uganda and then set up French and Kinyarwanda lessons for this week – figured I might as well try to learn a couple new languages since there’s a good deal of downtime here now! After a good run this afternoon and a delicious dinner that Candida made, we decided to stay in and watch a movie on the LCD projector in the house (we watched Shooting Dogs which is a film about the Rwandan genocide that I highly recommend).

3/7/09
We had our second Kinyarwanda lesson with Diane today which has yet again convinced me that I will never even be vaguely conversational in this language but it’s fun to try to learn anyway. Gail joined us for the lesson and we threw a bit of French in the mix as well so there are a lot of words floating around in my head right now. Afterward we headed out to Nyamirambo to visit the Umuhuza Association which was started by one of the cleaning ladies at the WE-ACTx clinic (Emerithe). It’s a support group for HIV+ people and they meet every Saturday – she invited us today which was really sweet and it was great to see such a grassroots effort to fight against the stigmatization of HIV.

3/8/09
Gail and I headed out to the bus station to try to catch an early bus for a day trip to Kibuye (a town on Lake Kivu directly east of Kigali). We managed to get an 8am bus and arrived in Kibuye by around 10:30 after navigating some really windy roads a little too quickly. We took a nice walk up to Hotel Centre Bethanie which was recommended by the guidebook as a nice place to hang out by the lake and charter a boat. Oddly enough it turns out it’s not so much a hotel as it is a Presbyterian retreat center… It was in a beautiful setting though and we had a delicious crepe with concentrated marakuja juice before hiring a boat to take us out to Amahoro (Peace) Island. It was about a 20 minute boat ride in a rickety vessel called The Hummer that had “Don’t Worry” painted on the side that of course made us worry all the more… Thankfully the water was calm and we had some stylish bright orange lifejackets for the voyage. We got to Amahoro and spent the afternoon there swimming, having a feast of French fries (they tried to get me to order chicken but after seeing the chicken that would have been my lunch walk by I declined) and playing on the tree swing with the restaurant owner’s daughter Jennifer. The island is just inhabited by this one family that runs a pretty limited restaurant and has set up a volley ball net to try to attract tourists over from Kibuye. Gail and I had the place to ourselves and it was just a perfect afternoon. We made it back to the mainland by about 4:15 which was just enough time to walk briskly back to town and catch our 5pm bus back to Kigali. A delicious dinner of pizza and fish was waiting for us when we arrived home… all in all it really was a perfect day.

As a side note though, I think I need to get a t-shirt made that says “Ntabwo nitwa Muzungu” (my name is NOT Muzungu)… it’s bad enough in Kigali but when you leave the city, everyone just points and screams Muzungu or even worse addresses you as Muzungu when speaking to you as though it’s your name. Kind of annoying – and I think the shirt would be pretty amusing for most people here.


Photos from Kibuye:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2138678&id=2600785&l=f5f56