The Modernish Father

If memory serves me right, twelve days ago I woke up with a horrible pain in my right side. The kind of pain that just knocks you down on your knees and makes you wish you hadn’t woken up in the first place.

Having had this kind of pain before, I knew exactly what it was. No need to visit the doctor for a diagnosis. As Jar Jar Binks would say, “Meesa be haben bombad kidney stones.”

Thus began the worst Wednesday morning in recent memory.

Kidney Stone the First

I don’t really want to go into detail about the first time I had a kidney stone, because I’ve spent a lot of time trying to repress the memories, but I’ll give you a little bit of history for comparison’s sake. It was about three and half years ago.

Since I didn’t know what was going on, I tried to see my regular doctor. They kept me at the clinic (without any sort of medication) for four hours while they shuffled papers, then gave me an expensive ambulance trip to the hospital where I managed to pass the stone before they stuck an IV in me.

Since I was already registered (and on the hook for a hospital admission co-pay), they went ahead and kept me overnight for observation. I got to share a room with an deaf octogenarian whose remote control was able to control both of our televisions, therefore allowing him to make sure I watched late-night infomercials at top volume despite my repeated attempts to turn my tv off. And he yelled at the television about how it was all “damn lies.”

It was a magical experience. Not exactly the tenth circle of hell, but not far off.

Kidney Stone the Second

So when I woke up last week with that unmistakable pain, I was stoked. Fortunately, The Wife was off from work that week so she was able to drive me to the hospital. (I guess if she’d had to go to work that day, she would have taken one for the team and been a few minutes late so she could transport me, but you never know. In any case, it was convenient timing.)

When you have a kidney stone, for some reason people feel the need to tell you that it’s “the male version of labor pains,” as if telling you that is somehow empathetic and reassuring. I must have heard that stupid phrase a thousand times in the space of a few hours. I can assure you that saying that to a person in the throes of a kidney stone attack does nothing other than make them want to kill you.

I had to wait a few minutes in the ER waiting room, but fortunately once the nurse took my vitals, I was in a bed and pumped full of morphine within ten minutes. Once the morphine kicked in, I was golden. You could have been setting off dynamite inside my kidneys and I wouldn’t have cared. The entire process was light-years better than what I had gone through back in 2006.

They gave me a couple CAT scans, determined that things had progressed sufficiently as to where I could take care of the rest myself and let me go home. By noon, I was back in my own bed, happily sleeping in a morphine-induced daze.

A few hours later, the stone finally worked itself out (I’ll spare you the details). Since then, it’s been sitting in a cup in my car, mostly because I don’t know what to do with it. Maybe if I’m famous someday, I’ll sell it on eBay. For now, it’ll be a nice conversation starter if I have a passenger.

Moral of the story: don’t ever have a kidney stone. They suck.

In less painful news

• I discovered a couch on the side of the road.
• The Girl discovered the joys of removing toe nail paint (or at least pretending to).
• The Boy and I played racquetball and he decided that he liked it.
• The Girl scouted out her brother’s new classroom at Meet the Teacher night, while The Boy obtained and studied the most important document they gave out – the lunch menu.
• The Boy started first grade and had an “awesome” first week.
• The kids have discovered that they both like watching Wipeout.
• It finally rained! The Girl watched with fascination. Of course, I left the windows open in my car that day.
• At work, I managed to launch not one, not two, but three sites in the space of about a week. I am now ready for retirement.