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.
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| Happy Thanksgiving from Room 4223! |
