In the weeks leading up to my first semester at college, I remember feeling a pain that I couldn’t figure out and was ashamed to mention to my parents… my dick hurt. As an eighteen year old virgin, I was terrified I’d somehow picked up an STD without the benefit of even having sex to get it.

The symptoms? I had to pee all the time, there was a burning sensation constantly, and for some reason my lower back hurt.

The last few days at my summer job were spent using the bathroom way more than usual, and back in 2004 that meant being much more bored than I am today. Back then, three years before the iPhone was announced, I had a compact Sony Ericsson phone with a couple very simple games on it. No internet. No e-reader. No comics.

That also meant I had fewer avenues to look up this potentially embarrassing problem. I didn’t want to use the family computer to Google it and be discovered by some parental control I wasn’t aware of… so instead, on the night my pain was reaching its absolute threshold, I dragged myself downstairs to use mom’s big medical book that Grandpa had given her.

Back pain, burning feeling, an urgency to use the restroom constantly, all signs pointed towards a kidney issue. I skipped right over kidney stones and assumed my kidneys were failing. I was dying.

By that point, I was unable to walk from the pain and felt like vomiting everywhere. I yelled for my parents, finally waking them up, and when they appeared, through tears I tried to explain what was happening. Mom, who dealt with kidney stones of her own knew better and assumed it was kidney stones, not imminent death, and they carried me to the car and drove on empty 3am streets to the ER where I was treated for my first ever kidney stone attack.

I got my first urologist soon after, learned to strain my pee to look for stones, and had to collect jugs of urine over 24hr periods for testing at least once. They narrowed in on what my stones were made up of and gave me a sheet of paper that had some foods to avoid and changes to make so I could minimize the attacks in the future. On it, were some of my favorite foods, but also some of my least favorites. So, as any teenager who knows better than the adults around him, I used it as an excuse to eat what I wanted and avoid what I didn’t.

There were a few trouble spots in college that I got through with just some pills and a lot of liquids, but during senior year, and again soon after graduation, I was hospitalized and this time needed lithotripsy to break them up and help me pass them. Again, they gave me a sheet of food/drink to avoid.

This time I made some changes.

I had been a vegetarian for the almost 2 years leading up to those issues, and that was one of my biggest contributing factors. The alternative sources of protein I lived on (beans, nuts, tofu) were high in oxylates and for some cruel reason, my body turns those right into stone making materials.

The first meal that broke my vegetarian diet was from McDonald’s. I figured that any meat product was gonna make me hurl, so why not go as bad as you can, then anything’s an improvement from there; I ordered a BigMac and McNuggets. Then hurled within minutes.

In the decade since, I’ve barely had any issues. I tried to follow my new eating/drinking habits and did a minimum amount of exercise to stay somewhat active. And when last Xmas was ruined with an ER visit, I subsequently cut out coffee and tea from my diet, ridding myself of a nasty caffeine habit that I do not miss.

So, one year later, writing this fresh from the hospital where I spent the day in the ER and evening having a kidney stone blasted apart with lasers has me confused.

I thought I was doing everything right, only to find out my body didn’t care and made a new stone anyway. I haven’t yet received a new list of foods to avoid but I’m starting to wonder if its just a stab in the dark. Whatever I eat only speeds up or slows down the cycle because, secretly, I’m a mutant. The first of my kind. My power is growing painful, useless stones inside of my kidneys and then wasting all our money on out-patient surgery to relieve the pain.

And here you thought Jubilee was the worst X-Men ever. I would kill for some firework powers right about now.