It started with a run.

It started with a run, just a little two-miler around the neighborhood. It was later in the afternoon on Sunday, June 3, 2018, and June in South Texas means it’s hotter than hell. My husband and I decided to go for a run, anyway. (My husband…I’ll call him “M”, because he’s not a willing participant in this story–neither am I, for that matter–and also I always fat-finger his name when I type it, even after all this time together, so M it is.) M and I usually run in the late day heat in the summer, because we believe mornings are for sleeping, sex, and/or breakfast tacos, sometimes all three.

The run was slow, because, well, it was hot, but also because I had been dealing with on-and-off hamstring/knee/Achilles injuries for going on 10 months, and M had been experiencing on-and-off back pain that seemed to worsen after he ran. So we were fat and out of shape and our run was slow and it was hot out, but it was an otherwise pleasant experience. After that, we showered, we had a beer (beer is a theme in our lives), we went and saw a movie at Alamo Drafthouse, we drank more beer, we came home, we sat on the couch and binge watched Sons of Anarchy for a couple of hours, we started to get up to go to bed, and…

BAM!!!

M could barely stand up. His lower back just seized right up. He had to lean on me for support. He couldn’t put pressure on his right (?) leg. We got him into bed, but his pain was excrutiating.

The next day, I got up and went to work. M was still in terrible pain. I checked in with him around lunchtime. He wanted to go to the doctor, which is unusual for him (oddly, he doesn’t mind going to the dentist, something I’ve never understood, because dentists are straight up terrifying). I left work early to take him to the doc-in-the-box near our house. I had to help him to the car, which he could barely crawl into or back out of.

We were seen by a physician’s assistant at the doc-in-the-box. He spent less than five minutes, by my estimation, examining M; even so, his exam was consistent with what you’d expect for a normal patient presenting with lower back pain. Lay on the table, do some push/pull exercises with the legs, stand up and try to bend and twist. “Yes, sir, you are correct, your back hurts! Here’s a shot of painkiller in the ass cheek! Here’s a prescription for an anti-inflammatory! Here’s a prescription for a muscle relaxant! Come back and see me if no improvement in 2 – 3 days!” Run of the mill shit.

By the way, the shot in the ass didn’t work.

Neither did the scrips.

M’s pain lessened, but only by a little. So two weeks later, we went to another, different doc-in-the-box type of place called Texas Med Clinic. I was familiar with this clinic, as it’s close to where I work and I’d been there before a couple of times, myself. Dr. Mota saw M. Dr. Mota had treated me once before, too, and I remembered him to be thorough, nice, funny. I liked him, and he’d helped me. So far so good for M’s visit.

Dr. Mota put M through the usual battery of tests, just as the other guy had done two weeks earlier. But Dr. Mota put him through a few more tests, too. Asked more questions. We explained that back pain wasn’t that unusual for M, that he’d suffered on again, off again back pain since he was a kid. But this time…this was just odd. During the two weeks prior to the visit with Dr. Mota, M and I had remembered that M had gotten flipped out of his tube while floating down the Comal River the day before the pain started. We kicked around the idea that maybe M getting flipped out of his tube had caused some kind of trauma to his back that the next day’s run exacerbated. We tried this idea out on Dr. Mota. He seemed to think the tube-flip hypothesis might have some legs. The back is a funny part of the body, you just never know.

Dr. Mota gave M the good stuff: Tramadol for pain, Valium to relax the muscles. M filled both prescriptions, but left the Tramadol in his car and never touched it. He only took the Valium once. Dr. Mota also gave a referral for M to attend physical therapy. He said that if PT didn’t work, the next step was an orthopedic guy.

The visit with Dr. Mota took place on June 18. M’s back had begun to feel better, but the pain that had left his back seemed only to have moved around into his hips. We found a physical therapist the week of June 25. M went twice that week, and it seemed like maybe it helped a little. But later that same week, M passed a couple of blood clots in his urine. The chronic, incapacitating pain already had M very frustrated and a little worried, but the blood clots scared him. He got on Google. Google told him that high consumption of NSAIDs like Advil could cause blood in the urine. Side note: while M never took the Tramadol, he was popping Advil like candy (and, yes, he’d stopped drinking beer almost completely by this point, in case you’re worried about his liver). So, bloody pee bullet? Dodged! Phew! Thanks, Google!

The weekend of June 30/July 1 came. M was still a little shaken by the pee incident, but we’d convinced ourselves that too much Advil was the culprit. But then his right side started to hurt, a sharp pain, like someone was stabbing him. His left testicle had begun to ache, as well. And all of this was in addition to the other pain he’d been feeling for all of June. M spent the weekend in bed.

Late in the afternoon on Monday, July 2, M texted me to call him when I left work. I called him around 5:30 p.m., as I was walking out of the office building. He told me he was back at Texas Med Clinic. I met him there. M said that he’d felt that day the best he’d felt since this whole thing started. Even so, the blood clots, the stabbing pain, the sore nut. He’d decided he should go back to the doctor.

Dr. Angela Scalzi was on duty on Monday night. She had M pee in a cup. The urine sample tested positive for the presence of blood. She ran a blood panel, standard fare. She said she’d call us later that evening with the lab results. She had also wanted to run a PSA, which is a blood test to diagnose irregularities in the prostate, but the lab said they couldn’t run that test unless the blood sample was frozen, so that test didn’t get run that evening. Dr. Scalzi thought M’s symptoms–blood in urine, side pain, sore testicle–were consistent with kidney stones. Even so, she wanted M to have a chest and pelvic CT scan, just to rule out other causes. M was to have the scan that same evening so that she could get the results that evening.

At no point did anyone ever talked about cancer. I mean, M had mused idly, in the way that naturally paranoid people like us do, that maybe he had “the cancer”. I never took it seriously, though.

But then we went to the CT scan place.