Posting on this blog, much less comic pages, have been a bit thin this year. To a degree, I’m disappointed with myself. I should be months further along in the storyline, and should be talking more about interesting and useful things. But I’ve been a bit sidetracked, and my energy level is not where it needs to be in order to produce.
Right now, I’m nearing the end of my second bout of kidney stones in the past six months. I had the first bout at the end of May, going into June. I suffered screaming pain (and projectile vomiting) due to a 1.5cm stone in my right kidney. They had me in the hospital for the better part of a week, just stabilizing me so the doctor could go in and zap it into tiny fragments with a laser. All told, it was a month-long struggle against the feeling that you’re trying to pee out a jagged, red-hot meteor that doesn’t want to go. This isn’t just pain, it’s Spinal Tap pain — on a scale of one to ten, it goes to eleven.
But wait, there’s more! On Friday the 13th (unlucky? For sure!), I was BACK in the ER with that same gnawing, piercing, wrenching agony…but this time, on the LEFT side. Sure enough, a CAT scan showed a 5mm stone in the left kidney. A lot smaller, but still enough to have me screaming on a hospital bed until they’d done enough tests to give me morphine. I was back at the urologist’s office, and I’m once again scheduled for the stone to get zapped on Wednesday.
You’ve heard about living from paycheck to paycheck. Some of you might even be doing it. I don’t use the paycheck to paycheck metaphor to describe how I’ve been living. Instead, I say I’ve been living from “spoon to spoon”. A wonderful blogger named Christine Miserandino posted how she explained a disabled person’s energy level to a friend by giving her a handful of spoons, and asking her to plan her day, each task “costing her a spoon”. She had a limited number of them, and if she was out of spoons, she couldn’t do anything more. It’s the most poignant description of how I live, I adopted it to describe how I feel at any given time. Right now, as soon as I earn a spoon, I barely have time to register that it’s in my hand before it is snatched away again, spent as fast as I gain them.
I simply do not have the “spoons” to do more than I have been. I don’t like it. It makes me feel rotten that I always feel rotten. I’m sincerely hoping that I can get past this period and become productive again, because frankly, this sucks.
Please don’t think I’m whining for sympathy. I simply need to get out why I’ve been so lax in updating, because I feel awful about it.
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