Head Cheese, Heart Strings, and Kidney Stones.

     Thursday it finally happened. A long week finally came to an end with the passage of my 20th kidney stone. For those of you who have never experienced the pain involved in the passage of a stone, all I can tell you is that it is often compared to childbirth. Childbirth that can last a week or more. This got me to thinking about pain and how I deal, or sometimes don't deal with it.

     Pain varies greatly in severity and type. Since this blog is an exercise for me and my brain, I am going to walk you through my pains. They may seem trivial to some who have experienced great pains in their life, but please do not take offense. I know we all experience many forms of pain and each of our brains react differently. What to some may seem like a 10 on that silly smiley face scale at the doctors office, may only be a five on someone else's scale.

 Not a very good tool, if you ask me. Also pain is very relative. The first time you slam your hand in the door it may seem as if your fingers will fall off, but by the third or fourth time most of the pain may come from the fact your a fool for doing the same foolish thing again and again. So, dear reader, lets take a trip down my memory lane of pain.

     To date, I have had one broken bone and enough stitches to make a sweater. I broke my arm when I was younger and all I can remember is skateboarding, crashing, blacking out and waking up inside. I don't remember the pain much so I can't speak directly to it. I do remember many of my open wounds that required stitches. Usually they only hurt for a minute and then the pain subsided. Not very high on the pain scale.
     Not until I had my first kidney stone had I experienced real pain. Your first kidney stone is a unique experience. I felt for sure that I was dying. The pain so intense that you can hardly focus. At some point it hurt so much that I began vomiting. My wife and I headed for the emergency room immediately. I thought this was it. Some strange entity had taken oven my body and I was experiencing (The big one). The emergency room staff seemed much less alarmed at my condition. After vomiting into the trash can I was asked to provide a specimen for the nurse. Well if the pain didn't have me freaked out at this point then the sight of urinating something akin to tomato juice surely did. The nurse's suspicions were confirmed. Kidney stone. I wasn't dying, but that still left the pain to deal with. A couple shots or morphine later I was good to go. I am not advocating drugs, but they were fantastic in the face of such pain.
     Now after 20 stones, I can tell you it gets easier. My latest stone was one of the biggest and I think I handled it pretty well. It's all how you perceive the pain. Since I know what is causing it I can wrap my head around it. It is just a signal from the nerves in my kidney to my brain that something is wrong. That is it. Just a neural system of checks and balances. Meditation (and some painkillers) make it very manageable. Up until about a year ago I still felt this was the worse pain I could experience. I was wrong.
    I have a couple of blown discs in my back that cause me a lot of trouble. No where close to kidney stone pain, but pretty bad. I went in for a routine Myelogram. A myelogram is an x-ray test in which dye is injected directly into your spinal canal to help show places where the vertebrae in your back may be pinching the spinal cord. One complication of this procedure is that cerebral spinal fluid may leak out. It is a clear, colorless fluid, that occupies the  sub arachnoid space and the ventricular system around and inside the brain and spinal cord. In essence, the brain "floats" in it. When balance is lost in your head you develop what is known as a spinal headache. I have to tell you, this was 10 to the power of 10 smiley faces worse than the worst kidney stone. My mother rushed me to the closest emergency room. They then took me on an ambulance ride to another hospital. For two days I endured the worst headache imaginable. I laid in bed hooked up to a morphine drip with a blanket over my head to block out the light for about 48 hours. I couldn't wrap my head around this type of pain because I couldn't think. I couldn't function at all. Eventually it started to get better and I got to leave the hospital. So that is my 9 on the smiley face scale. Now my 10.

    I had taught myself to deal with most pain. How to cope. How to rationalize what I was feeling in order to make in manageable in my head, then the unimaginable happened. I lost a dear friend early this year. The pain was something I had not experienced before. I didn't know where to go with it to make it make sense so I could deal with it. The pain was not in my head, but in my heart. How do you cope with that when there is no way to come up with a solution to manage it. I was in disbelief. This was a person who I spoke to every day about the ordinary stuff. You know, the one person you have outside your family that you tell all you stuff to. If one of my kids did something I thought was great, this was who I told. If I was down about something, this was the person that I bounced ideas off of to make myself feel better. We talked just between us for about a half hour each day. Then, all of a sudden, it was over. I didn't have that outside person to talk to anymore. It was just nice to talk with someone about whatever that has different experiences than you. See what they think. I don't have that anymore, and it gives me a great pain in my heart.

     I'm still about a seven on the pain scale, but I am learning to cope with this as well. All injuries seem to heal over time whether they are in your head, kidneys or heart. Some just seem to take a little longer. So with a saddened heart I thank you dear readers for reading. Next one, I hope, is a little cheerier.

Steve

Pride, Self Confidence and Respect

     A few small things I wish to put out there this week to get some reactions. A number of things have bothered me so much this week that I have to get some feedback to see if I am over reacting or if I am right in being upset.

     On Friday July 8th, the Space Shuttle took to the sky for the last time. A great moment for the United States. Our space program has always been the shining star of our country. During the sixties it brought America together when we needed a resurgence of patriotism. The Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs have led to most of the technological advances we now enjoy. Along came the eighties, nineties, and 2000s. We have begun to look at trips into space as routine. Haul up a piece of the space station, drop off a satellite, do some experiments. Launches of the shuttle were no longer televised after the Challenger disaster. You rarely heard what each mission was about. Well this last Friday I was looking forward to a change in television policy. Certainly there would be wall to wall coverage of the last flight of the Space Shuttle. We surfed channels at work for hours prior to the launch. Finally we settled on the feed from the NASA Channel on our computers. Within a half hour of the launch the local stations were still showing The Price is Right, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, Jerry Springer, Nate Berkus, and The Peoples Court. Really? The NASA feed was great. Watching the astronauts getting ready. Watching the mission crew batten down the hatches and preparing for the launch. Every kid I know would have thought the was the coolest. They should have showed this in every school in America. But alas, the networks dropped the ball. They preempted their shows for about fifteen minutes, tops, to show the actual launch. That's it. Fifteen minutes for the last trip into space for our country for possibly a long time. Shame on you networks. I bet when Richard Branson finally gets his vehicle going and takes a trip into space they will cover it. So for now I guess as Americans we will have to be content to be fourth in the space race. We can go back to convincing ourselves that we are indeed smarter than 5th graders, watching Jerry Springer, and hope that our kids grow up to be not astronauts, but game show and talk show hosts. Their getting all the TV time anyway.
    Gripe number two.....We have a company next door to us a work. They handle all the screening at the airport. Body scans, x-rays, pat downs. You know the drill. Well, as you can imagine the turnover is quite large. Because of this, they interview new applicants quite often. This last week they had many new applicants come up to interview. They can't seem to find the correct office ever, so they come talk to me. At least four people this last week showed up to interview in shorts and flip flops. One person was wearing a t-shirt with cut off neck and sleeves.(a woman mind you) The fourth woman had clearly not even combed her hair that day. She was carrying a baby in a car seat and had two other children in tow. I don't know her circumstances and I am not here to judge. She is probably trying very hard and doing her best. My only problem with these people is that they obviously failed to realize this was a job interview. Dress for success, they say. Put in a little effort. This isn't a hard job to get, unless your content on sabotaging yourself. T-shits? Flip-flops? What job are you applying for? Used paint salesman? (It comes in the shape of a house, by the way)
     Gripe number three.....I was at the Great Plains Balloon fest on Friday to see a bunch of hot air balloons take off. I got there pretty early because I wanted to hear an 80s cover band that was performing before the launch. (They were not very good. How bad to you have to be to make a Bangles song sound worse than the original?) The balloons were launching from a large grassy field. I got out the quick and put my blanket down. There were a few hundred people out there at the time. People in folding chairs in the back and people on blankets out front. I put my blanket pretty close to the action so I could be in the front row when the crowd filled in. I grabbed some food, put in my headphones and laid on my blanket until the action started. About 10 minuted before the balloons were set to fill up, a family of six starts setting up their chairs right in front of me. Remember I am on a blanket on the ground. hey formed this solid semicircle directly in front of me so I could see nothing. One of the best things about a balloon launch is watching them inflate. I couldn't see any of this. There were many places they could have set up, But since I was front row center I guess I was a prime target. Are people so self involved that they care nothing about anyone else. What would go through someones mind that would make them think that I wouldn't want to see anyway so they might as well set up there. To top it all off, they didn't seem to care about the balloons either. It was just a social event that they probably got free tickets for.
     So two launches last week and they both pissed me off. It's ironic that I had trouble seeing them both, and by no fault of my own.
     So, to sum it up Jerry Springer style. Have pride in you country. Have pride in yourself and respect you fellow man. So basically, Love and Rockets!
Steve........................