First off, I’d like to give a big thank you to Sue, one of my wife’s coworkers who has graciously and awesomely loaned me her laptop with a wireless card. She’s totally awesome and headed for good places.
“Why does Brian need a laptop, other than the usual geek reasons,” you ask? Because I’m back in hospital again… back where a friend is a friend… Sorry, I’m feeling cowboy-ish for some reason this morning. Must have been from the nephrologist/fork incident yesterday. Since I’m sitting here in my hospital bed, that means two things: my email replying will possibly be even spottier than usual (my webmail system is kind of a pain, though if I’m in here too long, I might finally catch up on correspondence) and this will be a super long post. Lucky you!
So over the weekend I wasn’t feeling so hot. Well, sometimes I was feeling reallyhot, but sometimes I was feeling really cold. My temp kept bouncing from 99 or so up to 101.9 and back. Erin had said we didn’t need to call in unless I was at 102, so I made damn sure we didn’t call, ’cause I didn’t want to wind up in the hospital again.
On Sunday, I started having kidney pain on the left side. It was the kind of pain where you feel like you’ve been punched in the back, and no matter how you roll around in bed, you can’t make it feel better.
Barb called Erin on Monday and they want me in for hydration and, you guessed it, a hospital admission. We arrived there around 9 and I started getting hydration. Found out around 9:45 that I was to have an eyes-to-thighs PET scan at 5:00 that afternoon, so I couldn’t eat anything after 10. The really fun part was that my last “meal” (still haven’t been able to eat much ’cause of the tastebuds thing” was around 5:00 Sunday night. Lovely.
So they pumped a good 1000 or so cc’s of fluids into me and I felt no need to go to the bathroom. I did feel both of my kidneys hurting at this point. My favorite nurse Jodi sat down next to me around 1:00 and explained just how bad it was that I hadn’t peed by this point. So, I decided around 1:25 that I would go ahead and give it a try.
Basically as soon as I stood up and took a couple of steps, I felt The Urge. I had to give them a specimen, and despite over 1000 cc’s of IV fluid at that point, I had just enough to fill their little cup – around 100 cc’s.
Holy crap – the nurse just came in and gave me Benadryl and my boady has IMMEDIATELY started to get tired. I’m going to go ahead and post this in case I pass out completely. I’ll give you part two either after I shake it off or after my kidney biopsy this afternoon.
Now that’s how you leave someone in suspense.