The Luckiest Kidney Stone

    Well, Ben's poor little Festiva finally bit the dust. So Ben spent like a week and a half manically looking up stuff online, and as of last night, we own a red 2-door 2003 Ford Focus hatchback! It's a pretty spiffy car. You should help us name it! I was going to name it after a Pokemon character, because as Ben said last night “I haven't been this excited to buy something since Pokemon Red came out!” But all of the cars in my family have been named after old people, like Walter and Edgar. Trials. We went up to Richmond last night to get it, and since it was an automatic, I got to drive it back to the house! It's been almost 9 months since I've driven anything, and it was weird. But the car drive really smoothly, handled easily, and didn't have that annoying kchuk-kchuk-k-LUNK associated with manual transmissions. So that was exciting.

    We were planning to take off early this morning to drive to Corvallis, OR, to spend Thanksgiving with Ben's aunt and uncle, so we were pretty excited to have our serviceable new car to take us! But then Ben called me at like 2:30 in the morning like “Eurghhhhh........ pain.......... bring the car and take me to the ER.” So it's a good thing that we found the car last night and brought it back to my house, because the poor guy was in no fit state to drive. I took him to the Alta Bates Summit ER near his house, and after a brief triage in a thankfully empty waiting room, another brief wait in the ER itself, 4mg of morphine and a CT scan, the doctor decided that he was passing a kidney stone the size of a beach ball. I've heard that kidney stones are incredibly painful, and now Ben can tell you that they are. Poor guy.

    So he's in a room now, getting pumped full of fluids. We're hoping they can get a stent put in this afternoon to help kind of get things moving along. I drove back home around 7:30 to eat some breakfast, take a shower, and put on some “real” clothes instead of the sweats and flannels I sleep in. Hopefully the urologist and the surgery team are  able to take time out of his Thanksgiving day to help us out. Poor guy!

    But really, this has been about the luckiest time to get a kidney stone. We had a car available, we have 2 days off from work plus a weekend, it's a holiday, so the meters aren't running, it happened before we left instead of during the 8-hour drive (not sure what we had done if Ben had suddenly doubled over in pain while driving on the Interstate), and he was able to be seen quickly. The downside is that we were planning a 4-day trip to Corvallis to see Portland and the Oregon coast, and it looks like we won't be able to manage that now, which is really a shame. And that we spent Thanksgiving in the hospital, instead of in the presence of family, friends and/or food. We spent it with each other though, so I guess it could be worse.  

Happy Thanksgiving from Room 4223!