March 10, 2014

It is embarrassing how long it took me to find my doctor's number in the phone book this morning. I started looking up the name of the office in the normal white pages because that is where it used to be. But apparently it has moved. Then I tried several other variations of everything I could think of, both in the white pages and the yellow pages, and got nothing. Almost ten minutes of that and I was already late to work. Then, as I was about to head to the door I had the brilliant idea to look up 'physician' in the yellow pages. Success. The office didn't open until 8:30AM so a little while after getting to work I called and made an appointment for after work.

My only real bit of productivity today coming up with and committing to an idea for putting teacher portraits on their class page. Because I can't move portraits on a page to where I want, just shift them to the right, I shifted the whole first row down to the second. Then I added the teacher portrait, which came out way too big so I had to do a lot of work to make it the same size as the kids, onto that line with their name in a big font next to it. I might makes changes to it later but at the moment I think it looks decent.

Around lunch my kidney started hurting and it only got progressively worse throughout the day. But I made it all the way to the end, mostly because the last class in the lab was planning on breaking the ice and trying a formative test for the state assessment. I'm glad I stayed but it didn't go well. On the Language Arts test they could answer all the questions but when the kids got to the end and clicked Review, an error popped up and kicked them back to the test menu, not saving the results. On the Math test, the kids couldn't even answer the questions. They could start on any question they wanted but as soon as they answered it and attempted to move on, they would get an error and booted back to the test menu. Kind of frustrating. Hopefully that can get sorted out before testing starts.

Right after school I went to my appointment. From my x-ray I learned two things. The first is that I'm not a malingerer, I have a kidney stone, and it is possibly around 6mm big. That is a new record for me. It is generally believed that stones over 4mm cannot be passed on their own. This made sense when I saw that after almost a month of dealing with it, the stone had barely left my kidney. That was disheartening. It was after five o'clock by the end of the appointment but in the morning they are going to call and schedule an appointment for me with a new urologist. I told my doctor that I had tried my current urologist's advice and just made more stones so I was interested in another opinion. This guy is apparently fairly new out of residency so hopefully he will have some more updated views on kidney stones.

I also mentioned to my doctor that Hydrocodone and Oxycodone don't seem to have much effect on me so he wrote me a prescription for Percocet. On one of my trips to the ER they had to combine that with other stuff before I could feel any relief but my doctor gave me a really high dosage. I took the first one and kind of felt it but not really so two hours later I took another one. And two and a half hours later, shortly after finally managing to eat a little bread and butter for dinner, the Percocet hit me like a ton of bricks. In fact, I am picking this up again after just running to the bathroom to throw up. Nothing like copious amount of bread and water shooting out of your mouth and nose. And now my sore throat hurts even more. I hadn't shut my bedroom door when I ran to the bathroom so when I got back I had to bribe Tanner with a cracker to get him off my bed and out of my room. And then had to give a cracker to Alfie and Beau to keep everything fair.

I had a few bouts of decent pain throughout my evening, which I spent most of lying on my heating pad and watching YouTube videos. My goal is to go to work tomorrow but if tonight was any indication I don't know that I'll make it. And I don't know how soon or late I can get in to see the urologist. Right now it is late and I am tired so I am going to eat a few crackers and then go to bed. And hopefully not be disturbed by pain throughout the night.