3209 Interesting weekend in White Plains

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry,
but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

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I went to a weekend Mensa gathering last Friday, at the Crowne Plaza in White Plains. I had volunteered to work at the registration desk, handing out the id badges and the programs, so I arrived early. I like working the registration desk because you get to meet almost everyone who comes in.

After my shift I hung out in the hospitality room until about midnight.

The next morning, I got visited in my room by hotel staff and security, and then got a ride to the White Plains Hospital Center (strange name...Hospital Center?) in an ambulance with sirens and lights and everything, followed by a CT scan and a bunch of stuff, and then into the OR.

My left kidney finally got thoroughly pissed (that's a pun) at being ignored for the past year and a half at least, and attacked me. It was very nasty about it. It should have obeyed that green quote above.

The short story is that there was a large stone firmly wedged in a tube (and a smaller stone further down) but they couldn't remove the larger stone because the kidney was very infected, lots of edema and general nastiness, and they didn't want to touch the stone until the infection was gone. So they put in a stent (they went in through the bladder, no cutting) so the kidney could drain, put me on four days of IV antibiotics, and kept me captive until my temperature stayed below 99 and the cultures told them what oral antibiotic would work. (It turns out all of them.)

So now I'm home. Pills four times a day for 21 days. I have to find a urologist here, and once the kidney is no longer infected, the stent and stone need to be, uh, addressed. Exactly what and how remain to be determined.

In the hospital, I walked. Round and round the halls of my section, over and over, whenever I wasn't actually attached to the IV (the IV was for 1/2 hour every six hours), until they gave me permission to widen my route, and I walked the whole fifth floor. But today I still feel wrung out. (Snork. Probably from blood loss! They drew blood like every four hours. Or sleep deprivation. You're not allowed two consecutive hours of sleep. When I left the hospital I noticed a sign in the lobby that they were having a blood drive. Hmmmmm.)

That's the me part, but I figure I should get this out now so folks don't think I disappeared.

Later, the rest of the story.
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