The Little Things… – The Misfit Farmer
Small things can make a big difference, especially when the small thing is a tiny deposit of calcium in your kidney. When I was a child, I vaguely remember waking up one morning to the strange presence of my next-door neighbor Mrs. Thomas. A retired principal, she was an eccentric force of nature and the only person who ever referred to me, in the presence of mom, as anything other than my given name. Mrs. Thomas always called me, “Stevo.”
“Good morning, Stevo,” she said, “time to get ready for school.” The fact that Mrs. Thomas was awakening me was definitely out of the ordinary–usually that was the job of my mom–but Mrs. Thomas was fond of quirky behavior so it wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary for her. At some point, she explained to me that my mom had to take my dad to the hospital in the middle of the night. He was in a lot of pain. Apparently, he was afflicted with something called a kidney stone.
Like father, like son. This past Monday, at 3 AM, I awoke bolt upright with a sharp pain, vomited, put on clothes, vomited again, then drove myself, with great haste, to the emergency room–because I wasn’t about to ask my wife to drive me again.
In the previous weeks, first my parents and then my wife had driven me to the emergency room on two separate occasions, but the pain always subsided right as we got to the hospital parking lot. Like a typical man, I refused and resisted actually going into the emergency room, having convinced myself it was likely just a bad case of indigestion. The third time was the charm, however. I not only made it to the parking lot, but I made it inside the emergency room, where I got a two for one deal: two kidney stones for the price of one CT scan.
For anyone wanting a life reset, I recommend kidney stones. I don’t recommend them for much else, but there is nothing like extreme discomfort and waves of acute pain for making you second guess life choices and reevaluate priorities. And the great thing about kidney stones is that they aren’t technically a medical emergency. This was explained to me by the ER doctor who said “the good news is it only feels like you’re dying.”