Thursday/Friday

 

Wow.  That was some weird day.  And long too.

 

Judy and I were bumping along normally, enjoying the victory tour where we have morning coffee, take our time waking up, go visit someone, get tired, and go home and take a nap.  Thursday was like that.  We visited cousin Janet and her husband Tom at their house out in the country way north of Denver.  What a delightful spot full of patios, flowers, ponds and birds.  We don’t see them very often so there was a lot of catching up to do.  They fed us well, and I actually felt like eating.  It was the most normal day we’ve had in weeks.

 

It stayed normal until we were sitting in our room at 6pm after my nap.  That’s when the kidney stone hit.  Oh darn.  Not now!  No problem; we know how to deal with this.  We hit back with drugs.  Tramadol.  Hot sit-bath.  No help.  More tramadol.  Still nothing.  This is not some normal kidney stone.  We were at the E.R. by midnight.  Morphine.  CT scan.  Judy warning everyone I was 18 days post-op heart surgery.  The CT results?  I have issues.  Three stones poised at the lower end of the ureter causing all my pain.  One giant stone shaped like a kidney bean still up in the kidney, yet to bring its wrath.  We’ll have to deal with these two problems with two separate procedures.  A night and morning of dozing through morphine, an afternoon procedure to eliminate the three most troublesome stones, a brief recovery, and we were home again by 8 o’clock Friday night.  It’s all kind of a blur.

 

This morning, Saturday, we’re all rested and relaxed, pain-free from the kidney stone, and back on track with the heart surgery recovery.  Know the old saying “If you want your toe to quit hurting, hit yourself in the finger with a hammer”?  I think Dad used to say that.  Well, it’s true.  During this whole kidney stone thing.  My chest didn’t hurt at all!  There are still a couple kidney stone procedures to go through.  We’re going to blast the kidney bean next week with a non-invasive shock wave lithotripsy (they’re going to blow it up with sound waves).  And now that I’ve got a real urologist, we’ll do follow-up studies to see if we can isolate the cause of my recurring kidney stones and try to short-circuit the process.  With any luck, this will all happen during our remaining convalescence for the heart thing.

 

I tell the story of life from my perspective.  Some of it is a blur or a blank.  Not so for Judy.  She has to be awake, alert, and responsible the whole time; a much tougher assignment.  This is not an easy assignment, and she has her moments, but she does what she needs to do, and what needs to be done gets done.  She is my rock.

 

Overall, the kidney stone thing is a minor diversion on our long-term recovery.  I feel better today than I’ve felt in weeks.  We both got a lot of rest last night.  Today we walked at a nice pond.

 

Took in some World Cup with Brian and Tony.

 

 

And got in some deck time.

 

It’s all good.