Getting Fixed Up In Brockville

 

Today, Catherine, my love and my best friend, will go in to have her hip surgically repaired - patching a torn labrum (the soft tissue cup attached to the hip bone) and grinding off a bone spur/overgrowth on the top of the femur. The surgery will be done laproscopically.

The work will be done in Brockille. The surgery dates available were much better in Brockville than Ottawa.

She's nervous about the surgery and also wants desperately to stop hurting and to be able to have a more full life once again with her daughter and I. I have ever hope that this surgery and hard work on the recovery will take us there. I wish I could take away the pain that she has been experiencing and will experience tomorrow and beyond.

In a slightly unexpected twist, a hip replacement's recovery period is about 6 weeks. A laproscopic procedure, while less invasive, has a recovery period of up to 6 months. I believe the reason for the longer recovery is greater irritation to the joint. I am hoping it won't take her that long and that no complications ensue or no further injury is sustained while attempting to heal up.

She's a brave, tough, strong lady. In that respect, she reminds me of my mother whose courage over the years of agony since the awful car accident smashed her up is a true exemplar of carrying on and always trying to find the positives in tough situations. My father also, having had to learn to walk 3 times in his life (as a child, when his leg was smashed badly enough the foot was only hanging on by a thread while my mother was pregnant with me, and after losing the leg below the knee at age 78), demonstrated what courage and resilience are about. I am going to help Catherine manage as much of that as she can.

I have seen what incessant, significant pain does to people. It wears down their reserves of strength and will. It enervates their spirit. It eats at them and hurts and nothing seems effective without serious side-effects (if then). It makes them exhausted and deprives them of a normal life and often of a normal diet. I think this is pretty close to Hell on Earth and I've witnessed it with both of my parents. I've seen an only slightly less severe version of this over the last year and a half to two years with Catherine.

We all tend to take our blessings for granted, not recognizing them. Mobility and pain free living are key examples, but we often don't see that until they are a memory.

I have every confidence in the doctors and in Catherine. Whatever happens, she and I and MJ will get through it. We will because we must - we are a family. We'll find ways to make it work. It'll be easier if the surgery is a raging success and recovery time is short, but we'll deal with whatever comes. I'm not going to leave her hanging when she needs a rock. I'm not going to leave MJ without the sense of stability and well-being that a loving home with constancy and care bring.

I will do as I always do - pray for the best and prepare for the worst. I can't mitigate the surgical risks or the possibilities during recovery, but I can make sure all of the mundane stuff (or at least the critical parts of 'all') get done - feeding the family, laundry, household cleanup, maintaining the garden, getting MJ where she needs to go (through into grade 4!) and helping her deal with the emotions that come from having a parent hurting and not being able to stop that (I wish I'd had a bit of support here but my parents didn't recognize the effects it would have nor of how long lasting they would become) - I do and I certainly will help MJ deal with those tough moments and with any misplaces sense of blame she may direct her own way for not being able to solve the unsolvable.

As I have told Catherine on many occasions as life dealt us harsh bumps we didn't need during the last 3 years: "I would rather spend a bad day dealing with tough stuff as part of your life then any other day without you in my life (and that covers MJ too)."

 
 

Aging Gracelessly

Around 7 NOV 2013, my kidneys - dormant for nearly a year- started being uncomfortable and wreaking havoc on my sleep. It seemed kidney stones might be coming my way again.

30 DEC 2013 was the date of my CATscan. 3 JAN 2014 was when my G.P. called to give me the mixed bag of news which appears to be my lot.

On the plus sign, no sign of kidney stones or non-stone blockages. That's good.

On the less good side, my right kidney is showing signs of calcification both in the passages and organ tissue. If I understand correctly, this means reduced efficacy.

It appears this calcification is a consequence of some cholesterol issue. Untreated, renal failure in the right kidney is possible. The left may be clear now but that could change.

The intervention appears to be starting to take a statin daily, get back to the gym, lose more weight and take omega-3 supplements. Also useful is drinking water, perhaps demineralized, limiting salt, watching blood sugar, and avoiding drugs hard on tje kidneys. Unfortunately this includes many painkillers to help with the ache/claw-in-side discomfort which isn't wonderful. Also grapefruit is off my menu.

One issue right now is the statins are pricey. I am making choices between hand physio to fix my scarred and problematic hand vs. drug meds. $54 for the starins isn't cheap and physio is $140/hr. Have to see what I can afford.

I can go back to the gym and use my wind trainer. I can walk in temps to about -10 C. I can drink water. Hopefully the statin will halt the kidney damage.

It is frustrating to be close to the life I always wanted but to have my future impinged upon by this condition.

Still, I am grateful for my blessings and supports. They make things easier.

Treasure your health. It underpins most other agendas.

Life Is Never Boring

This last week has been a mix of good and bad for me, just like the rest of the world, although for more personal reasons. The academic things I've struggled through to complete (two exams) have ended well (92% and 100%). On the other hand, the medical file has taken a turn for the more painful. On the third hand, I've arranged two sets of docs to be looking at my health. On the fourth hand, things are going well with my sweet heart. It really is a mixed bag.

Last Wednesday night, I started to get sore in the kidneys. I've had this on and off the last year, short bouts that were usually addressed with drinking a bunch of water and sometimes with a tylenol 1. The feeling is generally more like an ache than a stabbing pain and usually isn't severe enough to do more than make you uncomfortable.

What came Wednesday was more pronounced although still not stabbing. It was not amenable to tylenol 1s or enough water (1.5 - 2 liters a day exclusive of other fluids) as it kept up. It disrupted my sleeping patterns pretty badly. By Friday, it wasn't relenting, so I went to see the walk-in doctor and she said I should talk to my urologist again to see if I was within the 1 year follow-up period to avoid a new referral. That's about all they can do since walk-in clinics here don't prescribe anything strong enough to dent a real attack.

Wednesday through Sunday were times I was supposed to be writing 4 exams in my Java Enterprise Developer course. I tried studying, but I couldn't sit in one position for long and any posture other than prone was not very good. I was reading lines in the text 3 to 5 times trying to make much sense of them and retention and recall were significantly sub par. I didn't get to do much useful studying until  Saturday night and I should have been completed 3 of the 4 exams by then.

Sunday, I did study for an successfully execute two of the tests. The water loading helped a bit... I was sore but managed a 23 hour day of work. I did part of a third test, but the combination of fatigue, long-form answers, the kidney twinging, and my recently-sliced up and not yet fully healed finger meant I wasn't completing the test in the time allocated. My typing accuracy was poor with the finger and my speed is way down and the long form answers requiring very precise syntax were just not being completed in any sort of timely fashion.

I never did get to that 4th exam at all.

Provisions are being made to let me have some more time on the 3rd and to take the 4th. The college has a mostly-sane policy of requiring a doctor's note, but that meant another office visit and the walk-in doctor can't say too much other than 'patient was unwell this date to that date'.

I have an appointment to see the urologist again on the 26th of November which is great (assuming I don't get a full-fledged stone attack before then). I have an appointment with a new G.P. on the 2nd of December when he becomes my G.P. Hopefully one of these two steps will result in my getting sufficient painkillers to weather any attacks at home (has to be something like morphine as weaker stuff just can't control the pain of a full fledged attack and apparently the pain actually impedes the passing of the stone).

If anything happens between now and then, it'll be off to emergency. Today, the kidney has been (at least in the morning) more sharply painful and I've got some radiated discomfort. That's the kind of sensations I had when I did have a stone doing its thing in my kidney last year which is part of what has me a bit worried about another full-fledged attack.

I've put myself on an alpha blocker (leftover from last year) called Teva-Terasozin to help dilate the kidney passages. Hopefully that'll help.

Catherine is kind of scared by this whole thing and I get that. It's unpleasant. But people live with this stuff (stay home, medicate when there is an attack) for decades. It's no fun, but it is a well-understood thing. I wouldn't even worry about going to the hospital if I had sufficient pain meds at home, but the concerns about people abusing narcotics (possibly valid) have made prescriptions hard to come by and thus the walk-in clinics can't help.

The school and I will come to an accommodation. My kidney and I will survive this. I'm still lucky to have Catherine, overall health, and good friends and family and to be studying interesting stuff at school. I'm not letting this dampen my sense of life being a good thing.