....followed by six of the worst!

So many of you know that I awoke the Friday morning feeling fine, but within 5 minutes I began to feel a pain in my lower right abdomen. This ramped up very, very quickly. Ten minutes later we were herding the boys to the car with me doubled over in pain. Thankfully the ER is only about 10 minutes away, though it seemed like an hour. We got to the ER and while Jo was at registration two nurses came to me in the hall and took me away before we got any further. They got me hooked up to an IV and drew blood and all that. I was actually throwing up just from the pain. So long story shorter, they suspected a kidney stone and sent me to get a CAT scan. Sure enough, kidney stone. Only about 3-4mm but when you send something sharp as glass down an internal organ, size becomes less an issue. So we were able to get the pain down to within reason. Well various flare ups and two more ER visits and i finally made it to Wednesday when I can visit the Urologist. So we do that and get an X-ray to find out where the stone is. Turns out it was almost at the end. So we decide not to go to the operating room and suck it up. I took some pain killers at night and went to bed around 11:30. As usual I woke up about 4:45 when the pain meds wore off. This morning though the pain wasn't quite as bad and so I decided to hold off and not do another pill. I was awake thru when everyone else wakes up but nodded off at about 6:10 for about ten minutes. When i woke up, I was pain free!!!! Happy! So I said to Jo "Need help with the garbage?" She looked at me like, right, what are you gonna do! I said I all the sudden don't have pain and think that maybe the stone passed into the bladder. I was right. I'll save you the gruesome details but the stone popped out about an hour later. I am super happy to be done with that but I'm not 100% yet. I've still got a few smaller side issues, but I am so much happier. So, that's been my week. I've been so drugged I really don't know how the rest of my families has been. I guess I'll have to find out.

Later for now,
Jim