You've Got to be Kidneying Me

As you may or may not have noticed, David has been quiet for a little while.

That's because he has been dealing with a little visitor for just over a week.

The first time this little visitor dropped by (September 2012), an important and memorable ode was written in his honour after he had departed. Read (or re-read) it here: The Passing of A. Stone.

This time, I feel no affection for the little guy. I am not wistful about his departure. He was a nasty piece of work and I'm glad he's gone from my kidney and my urinary tract (if indeed, he's gone).

I don't know exactly what he looked like, but I imagine something like this sliding through the tight confines of my urinary tract:

So this time, in his honour, I offer a few scattered thoughts:

• Is passing a kidney stone akin to giving birth? I don't know. The only experts who might have an informed opinion would be women who have done both. And I've heard that some say passing a kidney stone is worse, while others say it's not even close. I suspect the truth is that it depends on what you've passed and what you're left with. If after childbirth, the resulting child looks and/or behaves like the stone I've depicted above, I'm guessing the experience is no better than, and probably worse than passing a stone. And on the other hand, you probably remember childbirth as a more pleasant experience if you end up with something that looks like this...

 

• Why are there so few Disney characters who suffer from kidney stones?  With the exception of Beauty and the Beast, the subject is barely ever sung about. I guess we need to be satisfied with:

No one's slick as a stone 
No one pricks like a stone
No one's neck's as incredibly thick a stone's...

• What are the foods that help you get rid of a stone? What foods put you at risk? What foods help prevent a stone? Here's a summary of my answers to these questions based on some extensive internet research:

I don't know

Lime is good. Beets are good and bad, but mostly bad. Cranberry juice (the real stuff, not the cocktail) might alleviate symptoms. Calcium is bad. Swallowing tiny crystalline pebbles could be a problem. A raw pheasant egg, buried on a cloudy afternoon in the shade of a sycamore tree, then disinterred at midnight using a brass shovel and eaten with the salt from a baby's sweat could help. Cats are bad (that's a general statement that I felt like saying, independent of context).

• Here's the good news about experiencing a second kidney stone: For the first one, I sat on the floor of my bathroom in agony for about 5 hours before screwing up the courage to tell my wife that my appendix had exploded and I was about to die. For the second one, I was asleep in bed at 11:45 pm when I awoke with an all-too familiar pain. I immediately dragged myself from bed, packed a bag, got dressed, brushed my teeth, grabbed some Junior Mints, and politely interrupted my wife (who was playing cards with the neighbours at the time) to tell her that we should probably make our way to the hospital around about now. From first hint of pain (hint being an understatement) to intravenous morphine in about 75 minutes. Because once you've had a rock in your guts causing mayhem and stabbing randomly and frequently at the walls of your kidney, you tend to remember what that feels like. And that's a good thing. I can't wait to experience it again.

• Here's some advice for the friends and families of a kidney stone victim. The sufferer can make jokes and they're funny. You should not. Nothing you say is funny. Links to internet pages about foods that prevent kidney stones should be sent once the suffering is over. Conversations about how painful the passage is, links to Seinfeld episodes about Kramer's stone, arguments about childbirth vs. kidney stones (and so on) don't really add much to the whole experience for the sufferer. Compassion should come in the form of silent devotion, immediate response to whispered requests, and otherwise - absence. The sufferer will love you when it's all over (but that's not a given, so be careful). You can't help with the passage - it is a Vision Quest upon which we must embark alone.

• While enduring this particular stone, I gave a keynote presentation at a conference, I shoveled the driveway (sort of, once), I took minimal pain medicine, I didn't yell, I didn't drag anyone down into the well of pain I found myself in, and I even went to the bathroom by myself (after 4 days of not doing so I might add). I am the hero here. Let us celebrate me and my re-emergence from a week of fear for my life. 

Until next time...thanks for listening. David.

Ice Carrots

She calls icicles ice carrots.
She calls grilled cheese girl cheese.
She calls a whirlpool a swirlpool.

In our furious rush to teach her how things are supposed to be and what things are supposed to be called, we'll rid her of these malapropisms.

Her sisters had to give up orps and craps; why should she be allowed to hold on to hers?

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She's got day-of-the-week socks that she tries to wear on the right day.

She already knows to think thank God its Friday.

Not because of the socks but because it's the weekend. 

 She's learning to pause at punctuation when she reads.

And to use it when she writes.

She just figured out that she can probably count as high as 1000 if she could be bothered.


She can read a note on a Saturday morning that says "Daddy's gone for a run. Let Mommy sleep. I put paper out for you to draw a picture" and she will proudly follow those instructions because she can.

She pauses the TV when she has to go to the bathroom.

And presses play when she's back.

She waits until the Skip Ad timer counts down on YouTube then gleefully skips the ad.


She knows all the words to Somebody That I Used To Know.

Though she likes Walk off the Earth's version better than Gotye's.

She knows that money is needed to buy things.She has yet to understand that you can't buy everything you want.


She's learning to tell time on a clock with hands.

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I love every part of her journey. Even the destination.

I love lying on the floor with her at night, having cut out some really badly drawn ponies - mine is Turquoise Prisoner, hers is Emily Sparkle - and playing a game where we see which one can swim fastest, skate the best, or fart the loudest. I love it for 15 minutes at a time, whereas she could do it for hours and still want more.

Play is her work, as someone smart said; it's work for me too, but I try.

She read Get Out of Bed! to me last night. Cover-to-cover.

The reading will accelerate and enrich her vocabulary and her spelling, so that she learns to fall in line and say icicle, grilled cheese, and whirlpool (because those are the words you're supposed to use even though her versions are way better).

It will also make her need me less.

The older two still enjoy arts and crafts (even when they're not with their little sister) but we took orps and craps away from them and that's a shame.

And they haven't let me read to them in years.

I'm going to try to keep the ice carrots I think.