Fourteen months ago, about three weeks after Penny and I finished a long trek across the volcanic highlands of Iceland, I woke up on a Wednesday morning with a headache and a strange kind of pressure-like feeling between my eyes. By 9:00 a.m. I was dizzy and just felt kind of strange, like my head wasn’t quite attached right to the rest of my body. And thus began the Medical Mystery Tour that has been my life ever since.

It’s both frustrating and frightening to live without a diagnosis. I’ve been examined by two ENTs, a dentist, a neurologist, and a neurosurgeon. I’ve been treated by a pain management clinic and a physical therapist. I’ve had elective nasal surgery. I’ve spent about $1,000 on failed acupuncture and massage therapies. I’ve had X-Rays, CT Scans, and/or MRIs of my head, neck, sinuses, and lumbar spine. They’ve looked for tumors, lesions, nerve damage, and god-only-knows what else. Nobody knows what’s wrong, and yet I’m worse today than I was the day I first woke up with that headache last August.

It’s changed who I am. I felt so alive when I was hiking in Iceland. I used to be happier, and more outgoing, and more adventurous. I traveled. I hiked. Hell, I even went hang-gliding once. I’d spend my early mornings and late nights enthusiastically working on my novel and computer game projects. I had a generally cheery outlook on life and always looked forward to the next day. Now it’s all I can do to get out of bed each morning.

I’m irritable at work. I have home-repair projects left half-done at our new house. I barely have the energy to help out at home, and I feel like a terrible excuse for a husband and father. I worry about what the doctors aren’t finding and wonder what my life will be like in a year, five years, 10 years, if this doesn’t get better. I’m so thankful Penny has been understanding and sympthatic, but I feel awful knowing this is all probably very frustrating and scary for her, too.

On Monday I met with a neurosurgeon at Lahey Clinic in Burlington to review the results of my latest MRI, this one on my cervical spine. He was looking for stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal in my neck, to possibly explain some of my weird symptoms. But the MRI was normal, which is both good and bad. No one ever wants to be in the position of hoping the doctor will find something wrong, but after a while you just want answers.

There’s really only one other avenue to pursue at this point. It’s a bit of a long shot, but it feels like my last, best hope right now. I have a pelvic kidney, which basically means my left kidney is in my abdomen rather than my back. It functions well enough, but I’m prone to kidney stones because it doesn’t drain quite right. I’ve had kidney stones since my freshman year of college and I’ve just learned to live with the pain. But the hope now is that somehow, some way, as unlikely as it sounds, my headaches, neck pain, and everything else is related to the kidney stones.

There are a couple of different kinds of kidney stone pain, actually: the sharp, horrible agony that comes when a stone is creating a blockage, and the dull ache that you sometimes get when the stone is there but isn’t in the way of anything. In my case, I don’t have any blockages right now, but my kidney’s in such a weird place that when I sit or lay down I’m putting pressure on it, and that causes me excruciating pain.

I currently have two stones, both small but apparently impossible to get at with the normal medical procedures like zapping with lasers or breaking up with sound waves. There’s the smallish possibility that the pain from the stones, which right now is just absolutely horrible, is a) causing all of my muscles to constrict, and b) somehow referring pain to other areas of my body, including my head and neck.

It sounds crazy, I know. It’s also the only explanation I’ve heard that accounts for my otherwise bizarre symptoms. So next Tuesday I’m having another surgery to try to finally, once and for all, get rid of those damn stones. My previous surgeries, which have all been of the minimally invasive variety, have ranged from mildly effective to downright failures simply because the stones are so hard to get at.

This next surgery, called a percutaneous nephrolithotripsy, is much more invasive. The surgeon will actually slice right into my abdomen and manually dig into the kidney to fetch the stones. But it’s also, hopefully, going to be more effective than the previous attempts. The surgeon himself isn’t terribly enthusiastic about his chances of finding the stones. He says there’s a “better than 50/50 chance” he can get them, but it’s far from a guarantee.

At this point I’ll take those odds. Even if it doesn’t fix the headaches and weird pressure sensations, if it alleviates the abdominal and lower back pain and just helps me resume a somewhat normal life then I’ll consider it a step in the right direction.