Are you kidney-ing me?

So, it's a beautiful Sunday morning. The morning temperature of 40 degrees was rapidly climbing to a high of 72. Not a cloud in the sky. Life is good. About noon, I have the urge to pee. So I go the bathroom, and not much comes out. "Nothing to worry about," I say to myself. About 15 minutes later, the same urge, with the same results. And so on, and so on.

Huh! Could I have come down with a urinary tract infection? Not common in men, but it does happen, and it gives the urge to pee. I tell the wife, who is a paramedic, and she asks if I have any pain, and I tell her no. She says that it sounded like a UTI, and welcome to her world.

About three in the afternoon, this pain starts around my bladder area and radiates around to where my left kidney is. I was driving at the time, and the pain made it very difficult to drive, and the pain was getting worse. I got home and told the wife, who said that it sounded like I was passing a kidney stone and needed to go to the hospital.

I don't like going to the hospital. I don't like being treated. I don't like the medical bills (I have very shitty insurance). One in four people admitted to a hospital don't check out. But...I'm in a lot of pain so let's go! We walk out to the car, and the pain miraculously stops! Whoohoo, I must have passed it into my bladder! I tell the wife I am fine and don't need to go to the hospital. She smirks and says that it is not over. I tell her I am fine; better than fine. So we go back into the house. She watches TV while I play a game on the computer.

About an hour later, the pain rapidly returns, worse than before. When my wife sees me grab for my left side, she gets dressed without a word and walks me to the car. Now I am in writhing, terrible pain. The wife remembers that she has to pass one of her work stations on the way to the hospital, so she leaves me with an ambulance. The crew pokes me twice to get an IV, and then gives me a pain medicine that doesn't work worth a damn. Now the pain is mindnumbing, and has worked further down my lower back and was making my bladder area hurt.

At the hospital, the ER doctor recognizes me (my job requires me to visit the ER a lot) and immediately gives me some morphine. Sweet God in Heaven! What a wonderful drug. Now my wife is laughing, because I have a lopsided, shit eating grin. A cute phlebotomist comes in to draw my blood, and I find myself looking down the top of her shirt, which causes my wife to start laughing. About 30 minutes after the first morphine shot, the pain comes back. The pain is so horrible that I would have gone homo if you had told me that smoking a bone was the only way to make it quit. More morphine!

Anyway, a CT scan later, and it seems that I have a 2mm stone moving about. So, I have to change some of my dietary habits, since I'm 90% likely to get another one, and right now I'm peeing through a mesh screen to try and capture this stone.

I have a newfound understanding for those who have suffered from this.

I'm such a slacker

Ever have those times when you are really busy, but at the same time can't specifically say what is keeping you busy? These past couple of weeks have been like that. Between work, teaching, and family obligations, I have hardly had any time for myself.