Category: General

Just a little more information about this, my seventh kidney stone:

My wife works for the office that bills for radiologists.  She found the x-ray report from the x-ray of my sixth kidney stone.  Number seven was there already.  The radologist noted the 2mm kidney stone that was already on its way out of my right kidney.  He also mentioned a 4.5mm stone in my left kidney.  That's probably the one that's bugging me lately.

According to the web site of one group of urologists:

Roughly, the chance of a stone passing spontaneously is inversely related to the stone size in millimeters. A 1mm stone passes 90% of the time, a 5 mm stone 50% of the time, a 9 mm stone 10% of the time and so on.

So basically, if the kidney stone hasn't grown since November, I have a 55% chance of passing this one without an additional medical procedure such as a uretral stent or lithotripsy.

Yippee.

For now, I get to wait and wonder when the pain will come again.  I have an appointment with a urologist in early May.  Maybe it's time to shop around for a different one that can see me sooner, because I hate waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Late in the evening on March 25th, I had some pain that was suspiciously similar to kidney stone pain.  I woke up the next morning and it was pretty much gone.  I thought it was a false alarm.  Later that day, I hopped in a van and headed to Southern Utah University to help judge some science fair projects.  Only about a half hour down the road, the pain came back, just a little worse.  I was terrified, but again, the pain went away.

I had mild pain off and on for the next couple of days, but then it went away.

It came back yesterday.  This morning, the pain was gone again.  Puzzling.

This morning, I had an appointment for a physical exam with my family doctor.  He confirmed that there is, indeed, something going on in one or both kidneys.

This is my seventh kidney stone.  I'm not currently in pain, but I don't seem to be able to really relax either, since I'm wondering when the pain will start up again.

The good news is that they still had my blood work from the hospital when I went to the emergency room with my sixth kidney stone back in November, so today, they didn't have to draw blood.  My cholesterol, which had been a problem in the past, was normal, as were my blood sugar levels, so I'm not not diabetic either (which is one more thing I worry about.)  So other than these blasted kidney stones and needing to lose another 20-30 lbs, I'm in pretty good health.

So what comes next?  I think I'll be headed to a urologist and they'll probably want to do CT scans of my kidneys to find out what is going on in there.  I hate it.

Yet there are much, MUCH worse things to have to deal with in life, so I'll be grateful for what IS going right.

Roses are red

violets are bleu

Mr. Me has Been HaX0red

On april fool

Back in January, we bought a new Subaru Impreza.  The next day, I called my insurance company and gave them the information about the new car, removed coverage for the car we were getting rid of, and changed the coverage on one other car.

Yesterday, we received our renewal notice in the mail.  There was no mention of the new Impreza, the coverage hadn't changed on the other car, and the old beater Saturn was still listed.

<heart palpitations>

YIKES!  Something had gone wrong and I had possibly been driving my Impreza around without insurance for more than two months.

Fortunately, it was a simple mistake, and not even MY mistake.  My insurance agent had forwarded the information to the insurance carrier and someone had forgotten to enter one small piece of data, so the whole change hadn't gone through.  There was enough of a paper trail to prove that I had done what I needed to do, so I would have been covered, but it still freaked me out a little bit.

</heart palpitations>

How bad would it have sucked if I would have been in an accident and there was no insurance to cover the damage?  VERY bad.  And mighty would have been the sucking thereof.

Someone just told me that I missed my true calling in life.  We were discussing church basketball.

I loathe the game.  I'll freely admit, that loathing is due, in great measure, to the fact that I suck at basketball.  Really.  I'm not good at all.  It's not something I've spent a lot of time doing.  However, that doesn't change the fact that church basketball (by which I mean basketball usually played in the meetinghouses of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) is partly to blame.

As a young man, I had "scouts" once a week at our church building.  More often than not, nothing substantial had been planned and we ended up spending at least half of the time shooting hoops in the "cultural hall."  (Cultural hall = a fancy LDS word for "gymnasium.")  For me, this usually meant running back and forth on the hardwood while the rest of the young men on my team ignored me and the young men on the other team tried to run me over.  I finally quit even walking out on the court in the first place.  This meant that the other young men had to feel the obligation to make me feel included, and they would harass me for not playing.

I gave it a shot (pun intended), I really did.  I remember one time (I must have been EXTREMELY bored) that I picked up a basketball, and due to some strange alignments of planets in several galaxies, I attempted and made several 3-point shots in a row.  This, of course, meant that the other young men started to harrass me for not playing on their team against the other wards.  I said something both dry and droll that they completely didn't get.  So they just started harassing me to make me feel included again.

The angriest that my wife has EVER seen me was after my last experience with church basketball.  My cousin's husband finally harrassed me long enough and assured me enough times that he would make sure I had a good time, so unwisely, I decided to give it one more try.  My cousin's husband then proceeded to do everything that had ever been done to me before in my entire life that made me hate church basketball.  I haven't played one minute of church basketball since.  I never will again.  Since that day, I tell people that "church ball is against my religion."  It is.  I'm a better person when I DON'T play.

What does this have to do with my true calling?  My friend is a basketball official.  He's headed out to officiate in a game this evening, and I told him to "have fun" and to "taunt the overly-competitive players" for me.  "Hey!  You sneezed in my direction?  Technical foul!!  What??  You're ARGUING with me?  EJECTED!!!"

That's when he told me that I've missed my true calling in life.

Which got me thinking...

Maybe I SHOULD become a basketball official.  Then I could make everyone else's experience as miserable as mine was.  Maybe I could end church ball as we know it.

If any of you know where I can get some basketball official's training, please let me know.  I already know where I can get my concealed carry permit, because if I put this plan into action, I'm going to need it.

The pareto principle, sometimes known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity, states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from about 20% of the causes.

It's a common rule of thumb in business...  80% of the sales come from 20% of your clients, for example.

The principle has its basis in economics.  Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.  It has also been noted that the richest 20% of the people in the world have about 80% of the world's income.

It seems to have application everywhere.  One might guess that they wear their favorite 20% of their clothing 80% of the time.  Microsoft noted that fixing 20% of the bugs in their software resulted in an 80% reduction in errors and crashes.  My favorite, late director, Syd Riggs, even applied this to stage combat.  The person giving the action was responsible for 20% and the person receiving the action was responsible for 80%, making stage combat much safer.  (Or did she say 90-10?  I wish she were still alive so I could ask her. )

The one that's bugging me today, though, is that, according to my dentist, they perform 80% of their work on 20% of their patients.  And yes, I'm in that wonderful 20%.

Ugh.

A week ago Thursday, I played racquetball with a friend from work.  We played three games, and during the third game, something didn't seem right.  I checked the ball a couple of times, thinking that it may have gone flat, but it was just fine.  I finished the game (and lost, mind you), but never figured out what had gone wrong.

This last week, I examined my racquet closely and found a hairline crack in the frame.  The frame was flexing a lot more at that point, so my racquet wasn't responding to play in the same way.   I felt a little better knowing that it was my racquet and not me that had the problem.

Friday I purchased a new racquet.  It's a great racquet.  It's different that the old one.  It's going to take a little getting used to.  Once I get used to it, I'll regain some of the control that I used to have while playing.  I didn't play poorly with the new racquet.  I just wasn't quite on top of my game.

The other problem is that the longer I played, the more my elbow started to hurt.  It's going to take my body a little while to adjust to this change too.  For now, it's causing tennis elbow.  That's the pain of change that I'm currently experiencing.

I've been to see an Orthopaedic Surgeon about tennis elbow before.  I have a tennis elbow brace that helps a lot and he also taught me some stretches that will help treat and prevent further problems with tennis elbow.

Another change:  don't forget that Daylight Saving Time is starting (except those whacky Arizonans like you, Lisa).  I'd better go to sleep when I finish this, because I'll be losing an hour of sleep.  Oh, the pain!

Miss Giggles is going to send me something homemade this year.  The catch is that I have to do the same for three people.

It's not going to be anything fantastic, but I finally had an idea.  So...

The first three people that comment here and promise to do the same thing for three other people will receive something homemade from me this year.

I'm more than 10% of the way toward my riding goal for the year!  That's good, because we're more than 12% of the way through 2009.  But since I started riding when almost 4% of 2009 was gone, I'm making up ground!

It's been nice, really.  Some days, I really haven't wanted to get on that stupid spinning bike, but once a workout is over, I'm usually pretty happy about it.  My legs are getting stronger and I'm losing weight.  These are a couple of pretty good side effects.

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.  I broke a mirror over a black cat while walking under a ladder indoors carrying an open umbrella.  Nothing happened.  I don't think there's much to Triskaidekaphobia.

I survived.

Actually, last night's campout went very well.

There was a glitch or two right at the beginning as I had to deal with someone that is a big fish in a very small pond, but once that was out of the way, we really had a good time.

Here's where we slept:

The "burritos" we slept in were warm... WAY too warm at first.  I wasn't cold at all at any time during the night.

The next morning was fun!  Snowshoeing is a blast.  We hiked a couple of miles each way, gaining at least 1000 feet in elevation on the outbound trip.

Most importantly, I didn't get the urge to kill a single scout during the whole campout, and everyone seemed to have a really good time.