March 21, 2014

I want to be super passionate and knowledgeable about a specific topic or field of study. Like a scientist or artist or musician. But I also want to know everything about everything. This leads to a conflict within myself that I have yet to overcome.

I didn't do much with my morning, nothing memorable anyway, but I eventually had my urologist appointment. I got there about five minutes early but I should have got for fifteen because I had to start by going across the hall and getting my x-ray. I'm beginning to worry how much radiation Marie Curie was exposed to before it killed her. The lady who did the x-ray was the same one who did my x-ray years ago when I first went to see a urologist, but she obviously didn't remember me. Whenever I recognize someone who doesn't recognize me it makes me wonder how often I am recognized by people who I have no memory of.

I'm not sure what time I finally got called back to see the doctor but I was out of there fifty minutes after I arrived so that's not to bad. My x-ray ended up being positive, showing no obvious signs of the kidney stone, although the doctor did mention that he was pretty sure he saw more stones in my left kidney. Not surprising, unfortunately. I'd also feel safe assuming there were more stones in my right kidney but that one wasn't in the x-ray. So that sucks but hopefully none of them will become large enough that they lead to another hospital visit. There is always the chance that they forever stay in my kidney and very break loose, which would be fine with me. In the next couple of weeks I need to go in and get some blood work done and in about a month I need to do the twenty-four hour urine collection. And then near the end of May I'll go back to see the urologist and hopefully those test will reveal some possible solutions to my severe ability to create stones. The doctor is fairly confident that a solution can be found, and he sounded pretty convincing with that confidence, but after however many stones I've had now, call me a skeptic. On the plus side, I got to keep the fragments of this stone so I can add them to my collection.

At work tonight I continued reading one book and started reading the next book club book, Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard by Liz Murray. I made it through the first two chapters, seventy pages down, and it is rough. Based on the title, it obviously has a happy ending, but getting there isn't going to be easy. And I'm just reading it, not living it, which I can't even imagine. As each new thing comes up I can picture it happening to the kids I work with everyday, and I know some of them live lives that are very similar to this book, and that makes it even more depressing. These book club books do a good job of making me really dislike humanity's potential for awfulness. On a more positive note, I also worked on my herringbone scarf tonight. I've made it to about eight inches but I'm still not entirely sure about it ever being finished. It is just so involved. But I'm getting a little faster I think. The things that annoy me are the one weird stitch several rows in, which I believe lead to me adding a stitch, which I didn't catch until several rows later. I would have pulled everything out when I recognized the weird stitch but I had no idea how to put the yarn back on the needle because everything is so twisted. Same goes for when I realized I added a stitch. In the added stitch situation I just dropped a stitch, and it's almost not noticeable, and probably isn't to someone that isn't looking for it, but I know it's there.

On a final positive note, I got off early tonight, around 1:15AM instead of 2:30AM, so now I can get six hours of sleep before my double instead of five hours. I had really looked forward to all the sleep I was going to get over Spring Break and I haven't had a decent night yet.