Category: General

I just want to feel normal again.

I'm sick of this kidney stone crap and I just want it to end.

*sigh*

This is NOT cool.

I lived through the Lithotripsy.  The doctor used around 3000 sonic pulses to successfully break up the kidney stone.  That means that I now have many small stones that should pass easier than a 5mm stone would have passed.  Hopefully, that will all clean out soon and I'll soon be feeling back to normal.

I'm sore from being pounded 3000 times.  I'm loopy from Lortab.  I'm having quite a bit of regular kidney stone pain, and I'll still need to push a gallon or more of fluids a day so I can flush the pieces out of my system.  But finally I feel that this is the beginning of the end of kidney stone #7.

So... for those of you that want to know what I went through today, keep reading.  I'll rate the rest of this post PG for medical grossness involving the urinary tract and its functions.

The fun begins today and continues through tomorrow.

This afternoon, I'm headed to the American Fork hospital for another KUB (Kidneys, Ureters, Bladder) x-ray.  I've had little pain since the last one, so the chances that the stone has moved are, in my opinion, relatively tiny, though I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV.  They're also going to do a whole battery of blood tests, which is standard for someone going in for a "surgical" procedure.

Sometime today, the surgical center will call me and tell me exactly what time I will be having Lithotripsy tomorrow.

Everyone that I've talked to that has gone through Lithotripsy has told me that it is painful.  Hooray.  Fortunately, I'll be sedated, so hopefully it won't be too bad.  However, I'm quite sure that it will be less painful and less drawn-out than passing a 5mm kidney stone in one piece.

If Lithotripsy doesn't work, then I'll have to have a Ureteroscopy to remove the stone, and apparently, I'll be sore for a week if they have to do that.  And as I've mentioned before, the very thought of having a scope put there gives me the screaming heebie jeebies.

I just want this to be over so I can move on.  I'm sick of drinking more than a gallon of fluids every day trying to move things along.  I've had pain off and on (fortunately more off than on) since the end of March.  I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop--wondering when it's going to hit me as hard as or even harder than the other kidney stones I've had.

I haven't ridden my bike for more than a month.  I'm afraid of being out somewhere and having to ride home in agony.  Not to mention the fact that the medication they put me on makes me light-headed, so I don't even dare ride the trainer.  I didn't get to take my sons to the annual fathers and sons campout last weekend.  Project 365 went out the window when I went to Wood Badge and I haven't had the desire to do anything that I don't really HAVE to do.

It'll be nice to just put this behind me.

On Sunday, my bishop said to me, "Repeat after me: Nephrologist."  He told me that he had kidney stones all the time for years, and he hasn't had another once since seeing a Nephrologist.  Nephrologists specialize in kidneys.  So when this kidney stone is gone and I get the results from the 24-hour urine test and blood tests, I'm probably going to take it all to a nephrologist.  I can't hurt.  And even if it only lengthens the time between kidney stones, it's well worth it, because this just sucks.

Hopefully, I'll be a lot happier in a couple of days.  Wish me luck.

The good news is that I no longer have a 5mm (think pencil eraser-sized) kidney stone in my kidney.  It's been moving right along since November.  The pain I felt in March, April, and into May was the kidney stone moving towards the exit.

So now I have a 5mm kidney stone about 4 inches from my bladder.  The bad news is that's the narrowest part.  The hardest part is yet to come.

My job until the middle of next week is to push fluids and take the meds that the doctor gave me that could possibly relax things and move this stone along.  If it hasn't passed by Tuesday, I'll be back at the hospital for another x-ray and for some blood work.  If it hasn't made its exit by Wednesday morning, they're going to blast it.

Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy uses focused sound waves/shock waves to break a kidney stone into smaller pieces that can then pass much more easily.

So now I have a plan.  I'm hoping that this thing passes on its own before I have to go get Lithotripsy, because it's EXPENSIVE.  The doctor charges $1800 and the surgical center charges around $5000.  *ouch*

However, that  pain seems to be a lot less than the pain in the kidney.

It scares me.

What I DO know probably scares me even worse.

I have a 5 mm stone in my left kidney.  That's between 3/8 and 1/4 inch, for those of you that are metrically challenged.  Or, if you're me, 5mm is about the size of a large boulder, for all intents and purposes.

It's kidney stone #7 for me.  I've had 3 in the last year.  (You know about all of them if you're a regular reader of my blog.)  That's 3 too many, in my opinion.

The good thing is that for the first time, I feel like I'm headed down the path to figuring out what is causing my kidney stones and how I might be able to keep them from recurring.  I've done a 24-hour study and they've taken blood to help determine exactly what the stones are and why my body might be producing them.  Hopefully that will lead to some sort of dietary change or medication or SOMETHING that will at LEAST increase the interval between kidney stones.

So tomorrow afternoon, I'll be back in the doctor's office, discussing options for getting this boulder out.  There are a couple of "surgical" options, neither of which involve incisions or stitches or anything like that.  One involves thumping the stone with focused sound waves to break it up into smaller stones that will hopefully pass more easily than a single 5mm stone.  The other option involves retreiving the stone with a scope.  That thought gives me the heebie jeebies, but it's still better than trying to let nature run its course in this situation.  I'm sure than none of my other stones were larger than about 2mm in size and they were excruciating.  I can't imagine how much pain a 5mm stone would cause.

So hopefully, by this time next week, I'll be on the mend and life will be getting back to some semblance of normal again.  The unknown will no longer scare me, and the known will be reduced and relegated to the past.

And yes, this, too, shall pass.

I have a million million things going on right now, and I feel as if I've hit the breaking point more than once.

Here's what I am/have been dealing with:

• Scout weekend campout (see previous blog entry)
• Wood Badge training.  SIX DAYS of training, people!  (Fantastic training though... I'll blog about it later.)
• Working all the hours I can outside of six days of training
• RIF at work
• Another scout weekend campout
• Trying to get 14 scouts registered for merit badge classes for summer camp
• Planning details of an upcoming family vacation
• Wood Badge homework including organizing a patrol project and writing my Wood Badge tickets
• Helping a stressed-out teen and a stressed-out tween finish a school year
• Older son will get his learner's permit in 3 weeks
• Wrangling deacons for Fast Offerings
• Preparing scouts for summer camp.  (Things like the Totin' Chip they'll all need)
• Visiting a urologist to find out why I am a stone producer
• Finding people to fill in for me while I'm gone for Wood Badge training
• Trying (likely unsuccessfully) to help my wife not feel like a widow
• End-of-school-year concerts, graduations, dance festivals, class trips, and the like
• Finding time to sleep.  (Yeah, right.)
• A 24-hour medical study
• Ordering scout t-shirts for summer camp
• Writing a blog entry  (Probably shouldn't have, but oh well)
• Did I mention a RIF at work?  (I'm still employed as far as I know)

So if I seem to be missing in action right now, I'm sorry.  It's not that I don't like you.  I'm just overwhelmed at the moment.  Life will hopefully calm down for me soon.

This morning, I came in to work to find a small gift on my desk.  Because of an important software release, we're celebrating today.  We're getting new (very red) shirts.  They're feeding us lunch.  It's a decent day.

The gift on my desk: a USB mini-vacuum.

Let the jokes begin.

Most Saturdays, we spend a part of the day deciding what we want to eat during the week so we can make a shopping list and head to the grocery store. Some weeks, nothing sounds good. Other weeks, everything sounds good. Both situations are bad because neither help us make a shopping list.

On Saturday though, I remembered a Food Network episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives where the host went to a sports bar in Vegas that had great stromboli. I don't know WHY I remembered that, but I thought stromboli would be good.

A quick search on the Food Network site resulted in a recipe for stromboli by Emeril Lagasse. It looked great, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It was fantastic. The best part was a combination of italian sausage, red peppers, green peppers, onions, garlic, and italian seasoning. That smelled HEAVENLY. So on top of the pizza dough, I put this mixture, ham, pepperoni, provolone, mozarella, and olives. This was all rolled up into a stromboli shape, coated with egg wash, and baked until it was golden brown. Wow! That was a winner. It tasted WAY better than a pizza from any pizza joint in town and in the end, it was a lot less expensive.

Then, on Sunday, we decided that we wanted au gratin potatoes. Another quick search on the Food Network and I found another Emeril recipe with red potatoes. Strangely enough, we had to figure out a main dish to go with this side dish and we settled on ham. These were really good au gratin potatoes. They were creamy and delicious and weren't runny.

So thanks Emeril!

For those of you that want to try these recipes yourself:

Emeril's Stromboli
Emeril's Potatoes Au Gratin

So... as Emeril would say...

Bam!

Delicious.

It's the 16th of April.  Tax day has come and gone.

This morning, I woke up to this:

Unbelievable.  My poor trees!

There's supposed to be more of the same today.  I hope it warms up enough that the snow comes off the trees before more is added or my trees will end up with broken branches like so many globe willows in the area.

Ugh.

Look, a theme that isn't blue!

I finally found a theme that I really like and it's not blue.  Ok, fine.  So the right side is still blue, but it's not COMPLETELY blue.

I've been a bit wishy-washy about the theme on the site.  Maybe I'll start to hate this one soon too.  But for now, I hope you like this theme as much as I do.