Kidney stones in Mosul

Najma's dad is a physician. He also started a blog. Here he talks about his medical history of kidney stones. Anyone who has ever experienced the joy of a kidney stone can relate.
This is not about politics. It's about being a doctor and still having to live with the limitations of modern medicine. In a way, this story is about all kinds of endurance, not just having to tolerate the pain of a clinical problem.

Two years later, I still in the military service but this time in the north front, I started to complain of more severe loin pain and occasional renal colic, I was the only doctor in that unit, we have no any facilities as X ray, or lab. exam. But we have almost all type of medicine we need. when I discharged from the military service at the mid of 1984, I started to check my self. The result was surprising to me, there was a large stone in my right kidney filling all the renal pelvis. I consult the best urology surgeon in Mosul, he decided surgery with possibility of kidney removal if there is a noticeable damage to the kidney. During the operation he decided to preserve the kidney as he found it still in a healthy condition.

The stone was very big and friable it fragmented in his hands during removal, although he made washing to the area but many fragments are left in place, to become multiple new stones afterward. That mean I started with single big stone, and ended with multiple small stones.

I tried to take some medication to dissolve the stones, both pharmaceutical and traditional drugs that prepared from herbs. The result I get; I ended with three stones in the renal pelvis, there sizes are 8-10 mm. in diameter. These stones continue to enlarged and cause more pain.

The decision come again from the urology surgeon, operation.
In 1986 I had the second operation to remove the renal stones. This time the stones were solid and non friable, but, this happen only to me, the surgeon remove two stones and lost the third. He couldn't found it. At that time, the facilities in the hospital was too poor, they didn't have portable x-ray machine or an ultra sound devise. So the close the wound when they give up and can't found the stone.
That mean I ended with one large stone in my kidney after two major operations.

Another Iraqi blog, Life in Baghdad, is kept by another family member, an uncle.
Last week he posted a string of quotations from famous people, with his response to each.
The list was lengthy and diverse. From the variety and range of ideas makes me think it was from a personal journal or scrapbook rather than some canned source.

"If you hit bottom, there is no way but up" Arabic proverb

- We Iraqis, and for the past 35 years, we’ve always thought that we had hit the bottom, but amazingly enough, it always turns out that what we had hit was not yet the real bottom. This situation still holds.... Please define ‘bottom’ we do need to know where we stand.