Month: August 2014

Sunday: Cassidy has odd abdominal pain. It’s on the left so I’m not too worried. Give her medicine, assume it’s period pain, continue on with day. Then she pees blood and I’m like yeah, to Urgent Care we go! The doctor we get is kind of a tool and doesn’t really listen to anything I say and blows it off as dehydration even though I told her SEVERAL TIMES that I’ve been hospitalized for dehydration more than once and this was NOT dehydration pee, it was BLOODY urine. They take urine… and don’t test for blood. Tells us that since her pain is only a 2/10 to go home, take some over the counter pain pain meds and see how it goes.

Monday: Cassidy is fine, I am fine, Ben is fine. EVERYBODY IS FINE. Well, not totally true. Cassidy is sunburned because she went to band camp and was in the sun for 10 hours straight. I spread an entire branch of aloe on her over the course of the evening.

Tuesday: I’d been at work for three hours when Cassidy calls me frantic and in tears and YOU NEED TO COME GET ME RIGHT NOW I AM IN SO MUCH PAIN IT’S A NINE OUT OF TEN, MOM! COME NOW!. I get to the school. She’s down to a 6/10 but she’d thrown up right before I got there.

We go to back to Urgent Care but Cassidy’s pain is only about a 2/10 at this point. We get a doctor that KICKS ASS. She’s not going to let us leave without some kind of diagnosis. She gets a urine sample right away and collects some blood then has us sit in the waiting room to wait for results. 10 minutes later Cassidy is hunched over in pain and throwing up with 7/10 pain.

Doctor calls us back into an exam room and tells us that since Cassidy is having this random pain and nausea she just wants us to go upstairs for a CT scan and an ultrasound while we wait for blood and urine results. Cassidy has the CT scan, we go right next door and they prep her for the ultrasound but just as the tech starts to check her kidney we get a knock on the door and the nurse says don’t bother ultrasounding the kidneys, just check for ovarian cysts. I’m not sure if this means they already found NOTHING in the kidney or SOMETHING in the kidney.

Head back to Urgent Care and the doctor says, “SURPRISE! You still have blood in your urine and the CT scan shows that you have two kidney stones! One is traveling (all the pain) and one is still in the kidney.” She made us an immediate appointment to see the Urologist so back upstairs we went for that appointment. Of course, by that time Cassidy had NO pain so he made her do an X-Ray to make sure that the stone didn’t pass after all the ultrasound prep water was evacuated. Nope, it was still there!

The doctor explains that the stone is large enough that it qualifies for laser lithotripsy OR we can wait for it to pass on it’s own. When he told Cassidy that could take 2 days to 2 weeks, she immediately said THAT LASER THING PLEASE! So he sent her home with a funnel she had to use every time she peed just in case it came out before her surgery on Thursday.

Six hours after we originally got to Urgent Care, we were on our way home. FINALLY.

Then the pain came back. So did the vomiting. I tried to give her the Vicodin and anti-nausea meds but she’d just throw them back up as soon as she took them. EVERYTHING came back up. The pain got to a 9/10 so I loaded her back up and we headed to the ER. We got there at midnight.

Wednesday: At the ER at Camino Hospital we got another KICK ASS doctor after no wait at all. She threw up on the way there in my car (I had taken a barf bag with me when we left Urgent Care, thank goodness). Then again in the waiting room. Then again when trying to change into her gown. They got her hooked up to an IV quickly and pushed an entire bag of fluids, some better anti-nausea medication and morphine into her in record time. They also gave her another drug that is supposed to help keep the ureters open so that things can flow more easily. I’m thinking this is what got us through the next two days.

We got home at 3:30AM and she slept for most of the rest of the day. At 11:00PM she ate dinner. Than at 11:30PM she ate again. Then at midnight she ate again. She and Ben stayed up pretty late watching movies and talking. I was exhausted so I went to bed.

Thursday: She slept till 11:59AM when I woke her up to take her last drink of water before surgery. She went right back to sleep till 2:15PM when we left for her surgery check in.

Her surgery was supposed to start at 4:15PM but they were running behind so it didn’t start till well after 5:00PM. The surgery went REALLY well. They were able to laser both the moving stone as well as the one that was in her kidney. She now has a stint that runs from her kidney all the way down her ureter to her bladder than has a string attached that come out her urethera. She has to pull that out on Tuesday morning which is also her first day of school! We tried to get video of her when she was still on the happy drugs from surgery but she just kept saying she had to pee and PLEASE FEED ME I AM SO HUNGRY OMG.

Friday: She slept a lot of the day but still had some pain and a lot of burning during urination. Because she’s on Norco now which is a REALLY strong drug, Ben and I have been in charge of giving her all her medicine so one of us has been with her pretty much non-stop since Tuesday. I even have a shared a google doc with him that I update whenever she gets any medication because TECHNOLOGY IS AWESOME. She slept most of the day with the adorable stuffed bear that was waiting for her at the house from Nana and Papa when she got home from surgery. She names him

Saturday (TODAY): She woke up with a 4 or 5/10 paid so I gave her some pain meds then went right back to sleep. She spent most of the day that way but is up and moving around now. Still lots of burning when she pees but I think it’s a downhill road from here.

FUTURE: LOTS of water! Less salt in her diet! NO MORE KIDNEY STONES.

PS – Post surgery poop talk blog: COMING SOON!

We took the dogs to the beach last Saturday. I’ve been wanting to do this for over a month but we had something EVERY. SINGLE. WEEKEND. so we were just never able to make it work out. Finally last weekend we got up early and got it done. It’s silly that we don’t go to the beach more since we have an entire coast line 40 minutes away from home but 1) I really fucking hate sand between my toes and 2) Once your kids are old enough to have a social life that doesn’t concern you it just seems to happen less. But we have DOGS! And dogs love the beach so I want to start going at least once a month till it gets too cold to throw a ball into the water for Kumo over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

I was thinking on a quite stretch on the way home about all the random people you see on the beach at 8:00AM. The beach we take the dogs to, Rio Del Mar, is really popular for dog owners because when you leave the parking lot there is a sign which identifies the official end of the state park thus allowing all the off leash fun to be had for the dogs. So it’s mostly dog owners out there that early. A few joggers and then a few random old people. But mostly dog owners. Oh, and also a yoga class.

So in my head I categorized all the people and I thought, you know, this is something I should put on my blog as an excuse to show you how cute my dogs are while playing on the beach.

1) Dog owners who want their dogs to play. These are my favorites and as annoying as they are, I think that Ben and I fall into this category. We give Kumo and Danica the opportunity to meet all the dogs along the way. Sometimes they just sniff butts and move on (ASIDE: I found a really interesting YouTube video about why dogs sniff butts that you should totally watch because SCIENCE) but if your dogs are like ours, they instantly try to get your dogs to play with them. Especially Danica who thinks other dogs should just exist to chase her down the beach.

2) Dog owners who are all uptight and suck at life. My least favorite kind of dog owner. They think that all dogs except their dogs are stupid and when your dog tries to sniff their dogs butt they look at you as if you have personally violated their butthole with a hot poker and how dare your dog BE A DOG.

3) Old people with no dog that are mean and bitter and how the fuck can you be in a bad mood at the beach. There were two of these. One glared at Kumo even though Kumo never even looked in his general direction. I blame this on stupid pitbull stereotyping even though all Kumo was doing was chasing a ball through the waves looking ADORABLE. The second guy happened to walk by just as Danica crapped out all the ocean water we’d been trying to get her to stop drinking. We’ve REALLY been working on this with her but chick is seriously hooked on the stupid salty water and inevitably ends up crapping it all out in glorious fashion. Unfortunately we had no more poop bags because both dogs had already done the deed and it’s literally just clear ASS WATER that passed through her. So Ben and I shared nervous glaces like, “Are we supposed to just pick up this wet sand that’s two feet from the tide?” Then Mr. Crabby Pants walked by and shoved a poop bag into Ben’s hand because of course this guy with no dog carries poop bags on the beach. So Ben picked up sand and carried it around in a poop bag.

4) Adorable old people with no dogs who get the pure awesomeness of enjoying a beach walk. We came across two adorable old ladies laughing and carrying on as old adorable ladies do. Kumo went over to meet them and licked one of their hands then went off to chase a ball. The old lady that Kumo liked looked at me and said “Well, they’ll NEVER lose you in the dark!” Ben and I both cracked up and agreed because at the time I had on a hot pink tank top, neon orange shorts with neon purple piping and a bright peach hoodie. Like I do. Ben enjoyed relaying this story to Mel and Kim later at breakfast and there was more laughing. I’ve joked about this before because I LIKE COLOR OKAY STOP JUDGING ME but was so funny to hear it so bluntly from a random adorable stranger. That’s all she said. That one sentence. So much truth.

And just because it’s a Friday and I’ve had way too much coffee here is a throwback picture of our first trip to the beach with the dogs in 2010.