I’m still in San Diego. Celine (Helene) has been here with me for a week. We’ve found her a house. She’s flying back to Chicago tomorrow and then driving back to move to SD permanently on September 15th. I’m feeling a little downtrodden at the moment. A week with Celine is a little too long. She probably feels the same about me.
Andy and Vlad drove here from Vegas for a short two day vacation. On the first morning they were here, Andy ended up at the emergency room. He’s okay, but for the forty five minutes or so that I didn’t know what was going on it was terrifying.
My mom and I were going to the property management company so she could sign papers for her new house. Andy called and said he was in excruciating pain and Kevin was taking him to Urgent Care. Just the fact that Andy admitted he was in pain at all was cause enough for alarm, but excruciating? I knew it was bad. I told him to go to the emergency room. He said he would consider it. Ten minutes later while we were in the car driving towards Kevin’s house I got a call from Kevin telling me that he was taking Andy to the emergency room. I put the hospital in the GPS and cried some quiet tears behind my sunglasses while Celine diagnosed his symptoms as kidney stones and had had a one sided conversation about them interspersed with “blinker”, “are you getting off at this exit”, “coast!” and “you can move to the other lane if you want to”.
When we got to the emergency room, Andy was in with the lady that puts all of your personal and insurance information into the system. He was drenched in sweat. It looked like he had just walked in from being in a rainstorm. Although now, he had absolutely no pain at all. He said he felt silly and asked if he could just go home. Everyone of course said “NO”.
Kevin, Andy, Celine and I took our seats in the waiting room and recounted the events leading up to us being there. Kevin and Andy both said that they were really worried when they noticed sweat coming out of Andy’s fingers. Andy was writhing in the back seat with a burning, clenching, searing pain in his kidneys trying to convey all of his symptoms to Kevin so that if he passed out, Kevin would be able to talk to the doctors. His arms and hands were tingling and going numb. They staggered into the emergency room while Andy was on the verge of unconsciousness.
Then, as suddenly as it came on, it stopped.
When we saw the triage nurse and Andy described his symptoms, she said it was most likely kidney stones. Andy was not very happy with the diagnosis. Kidney stones are for old guys that don’t take care of themselves. We went back out, shared the info and listened to Celine go on (and on) about the radio show where she heard about kidney stones, Uncle Ralph’s kidney stone and all the medical things that Andy was going to have done to him. We told her to please stop, but most of the time, there’s no stopping Celine.
After a while, we were called back into a room with a bed and medical type stuff and had a consultation with a nurse. She gave Andy a jar and pointed the way to the bathroom. A few minutes later Andy came back and said, “Ummm, I think my kidney stone just came out”. It was in the sample jar. The nurse was amazed. The doctor came in, laughing and amazed. He said that Andy must have set some kind of record. All the information we’ve read since the incident said four days minimum and sometimes up to four to six weeks to get it through your system. He gave Andy a cursory exam, wrote a prescription for pain medication just in case and released him.
We went to lunch and spent the rest of the day at the beach. Andy feels like he has a new lease on life and we both feel very, very grateful that it turned out the way it did.