In Which My Kidney & Skotos Go On
Feb. 27th, 2018 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aYesterday, I had major annoyances. Today, I just have a kidney stone. This is an improvement.
The saga of my kidney stone hinged on a talk with my dad on Sunday night. He's had a few kidney stone rodeos. He asked me something about talking to a urologist, and I realized, "Huh. Why hasn't my Primary Care Physician sent me to a urologist?"
So, I left her another message, I told her about my ultrasound, which was unhappily scheduled two and a half weeks out, and I asked about sending me over to urologist. This apparently caused her to talk to a urologist. And he apparently told her I should get a CT scan instead of an ultrasound. I dunno if this was "No! We need a CT!" or "Our ultrasounds are always backed up and a CT is just as good!" In any case, she put in a request for a CT and I called the imaging office, and I got a CT scheduled for, not two weeks from tomorrow, but instead for today.
(Well, except for the fact that she forgot to sign her order, which is apparently a common problem at Kaiser, and so the imaging staff at first said they couldn't make me an appointment until they got that signature, but then seeing that they only had one spot left for today, went ahead and made the appointment, but warned me that they'd need to cancel it if they didn't have a signature by the end of the day, but they queried the doctor, and I queried the doctor, and they got their signature.)
(And we'll omit the fact that I'm pretty pissed about her scheduling me for a test that required three weeks of waiting rather than one that only required a day, because life is too tough right now for grudges, not that they're ever productive.)
CT scan was today. The stone is 7mmx4mm. There is currently no swelling of my kidney, which means that the kidney stone is not currently obstructing. It also means that there's no short-term threat to my kidney, which I'm fond of, despite its stone creation.
Also, the urologist thinks that this stone has about 50% chance of passing on its own. That's a lot higher than I read for a stone of that size, but I presume it's a combination of its uneven size and the alpha blocker than I'm taking.
I've got the earliest appointment possible with a urologist, which is next Tuesday. He clearly stated that given the status of the stone he had no concerns about waiting the week. Given that my unlikely dream was getting an appointment by Friday, this seems pretty rational. (And also, I'm still considering it as eight days before I was even going to have an ultrasound done, as of 36 hours ago.)
My pain medication seems to be working. That's a combination of the alpha blocker (which prevents spasms, which are apparently the big pain giver) and super-ibuprofen. I've had no major pain bouts since the wee hours of last Thursday morning. I just have a constant feeling of pressure of tension or something in my abdomen, combined with short, stabbing pain when I'm moving around if it's been too long since I took Ibuprofen. Twice a day with Ibuprofen seems to mostly do the job right now, and I can take it three times a day if I want.
Other than the weird discomfort in my abdomen, the biggest downside is that I'm exhausted all the time. I'm pretty sure that's the alpha blocker, and I believe it'll pass eventually. But before I was taking it, I was exhausted after any bout of pain.
One of the problems with the timing of this kidney stone is that I have a design workshop scheduled for next week in Santa Barbara. Well, my appointment for next Tuesday is a phone appointment (which Kaiser seems to like for follow-ups and test results), and my pain is under control at the moment. So, unless things change I don't see a reason not to go.
A bit of a relief to have made that decision, so that I only need to revisit it if circumstances change.
(I'm a bit queasy about going 300+ miles away from home when my health feels so fragile, but if there was an emergency, I could get back pretty quick on a plane.)
So, kidney problems not solved, but immediate stressors and questions are all dealt with and the next step is clear, and the next step is when we'll make decisions about the next/final(?) step.
My other big stressor yesterday was Skotos, and that had an even better resolution.
I could not get one of our games restored from backup throughout the weekend. It turned out that our colo has a bug in their backup-and-restore process where they bloat sparse files to their filled size. Two of our games use sparse files, including the one I was restoring — so the disk kept running out of file space on the restore.
The colo's engineer and I managed to eventually figure this out, and I just told him to restore without the sparse files. I had a TAR file that literally had the exact same content as the sparse files, so I was just able to restore from that once I got the files back. (Generally, my very redundant backup system that I created when we moved to the cloud should mean that I either have a TAR file that matches my backup sparse file or that matches it from 12 hours previous.)
So, problem solved.
And hopefully kidney problems are on their way.
The saga of my kidney stone hinged on a talk with my dad on Sunday night. He's had a few kidney stone rodeos. He asked me something about talking to a urologist, and I realized, "Huh. Why hasn't my Primary Care Physician sent me to a urologist?"
So, I left her another message, I told her about my ultrasound, which was unhappily scheduled two and a half weeks out, and I asked about sending me over to urologist. This apparently caused her to talk to a urologist. And he apparently told her I should get a CT scan instead of an ultrasound. I dunno if this was "No! We need a CT!" or "Our ultrasounds are always backed up and a CT is just as good!" In any case, she put in a request for a CT and I called the imaging office, and I got a CT scheduled for, not two weeks from tomorrow, but instead for today.
(Well, except for the fact that she forgot to sign her order, which is apparently a common problem at Kaiser, and so the imaging staff at first said they couldn't make me an appointment until they got that signature, but then seeing that they only had one spot left for today, went ahead and made the appointment, but warned me that they'd need to cancel it if they didn't have a signature by the end of the day, but they queried the doctor, and I queried the doctor, and they got their signature.)
(And we'll omit the fact that I'm pretty pissed about her scheduling me for a test that required three weeks of waiting rather than one that only required a day, because life is too tough right now for grudges, not that they're ever productive.)
CT scan was today. The stone is 7mmx4mm. There is currently no swelling of my kidney, which means that the kidney stone is not currently obstructing. It also means that there's no short-term threat to my kidney, which I'm fond of, despite its stone creation.
Also, the urologist thinks that this stone has about 50% chance of passing on its own. That's a lot higher than I read for a stone of that size, but I presume it's a combination of its uneven size and the alpha blocker than I'm taking.
I've got the earliest appointment possible with a urologist, which is next Tuesday. He clearly stated that given the status of the stone he had no concerns about waiting the week. Given that my unlikely dream was getting an appointment by Friday, this seems pretty rational. (And also, I'm still considering it as eight days before I was even going to have an ultrasound done, as of 36 hours ago.)
My pain medication seems to be working. That's a combination of the alpha blocker (which prevents spasms, which are apparently the big pain giver) and super-ibuprofen. I've had no major pain bouts since the wee hours of last Thursday morning. I just have a constant feeling of pressure of tension or something in my abdomen, combined with short, stabbing pain when I'm moving around if it's been too long since I took Ibuprofen. Twice a day with Ibuprofen seems to mostly do the job right now, and I can take it three times a day if I want.
Other than the weird discomfort in my abdomen, the biggest downside is that I'm exhausted all the time. I'm pretty sure that's the alpha blocker, and I believe it'll pass eventually. But before I was taking it, I was exhausted after any bout of pain.
One of the problems with the timing of this kidney stone is that I have a design workshop scheduled for next week in Santa Barbara. Well, my appointment for next Tuesday is a phone appointment (which Kaiser seems to like for follow-ups and test results), and my pain is under control at the moment. So, unless things change I don't see a reason not to go.
A bit of a relief to have made that decision, so that I only need to revisit it if circumstances change.
(I'm a bit queasy about going 300+ miles away from home when my health feels so fragile, but if there was an emergency, I could get back pretty quick on a plane.)
So, kidney problems not solved, but immediate stressors and questions are all dealt with and the next step is clear, and the next step is when we'll make decisions about the next/final(?) step.
My other big stressor yesterday was Skotos, and that had an even better resolution.
I could not get one of our games restored from backup throughout the weekend. It turned out that our colo has a bug in their backup-and-restore process where they bloat sparse files to their filled size. Two of our games use sparse files, including the one I was restoring — so the disk kept running out of file space on the restore.
The colo's engineer and I managed to eventually figure this out, and I just told him to restore without the sparse files. I had a TAR file that literally had the exact same content as the sparse files, so I was just able to restore from that once I got the files back. (Generally, my very redundant backup system that I created when we moved to the cloud should mean that I either have a TAR file that matches my backup sparse file or that matches it from 12 hours previous.)
So, problem solved.
And hopefully kidney problems are on their way.
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Date: 2018-02-28 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-28 04:34 pm (UTC)