It's Better Than No Title at All...

I thought I'd stop by and give you all a bit of an update...just for fun! :)

Okay, so first I guess I need to explain what the surgeries were for and what they were supposed to do.

The first one was a laser cystoscopy--which means that the dr. goes into the kidney with a camera and a laser and blasts any stones that he finds blocking the kidney.
This was done in both of my kidneys.

However, the dr. said that there were too many stones both in the kidney filters and deep in the kidney tissue as well....sigh. So he decided to do an experiment and do an extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy--which means that they send shockwaves through a bag of silicon into the kidney to break up stones in there. It is usually done on just one stone, and it has to be precisely aimed at that stone over and over until it is broken up into pieces small enough to pass. Since I didn't have just one stone, the idea was to try to break up as many of them as possible to clear out my filters and help my kidneys to work a bit better and relieve some of the pain and hopefully the nausea.

I was hoping that they would be able to clear the kidney of all those little suckers completely, but apparently there were just too many. They are only allowed to give you 2500 shocks per procedure, and apparently that wasn't enough. And since there is the possibility that the shockwaves could also cause damage to the kidney, I won't be able to have it done again anytime soon. My doctor, however, told me yesterday that while there are still a bunch of calcifications in my kidneys, they were able to get out more than he had expected them to get. :)

Today and tomorrow I am having a kidney function test to determine how well my kidneys are functioning. I will continue to have those tests on a regular basis and will repeat the above surgeries as needed, and as often as can be tolerated I suppose, to try to preserve my kidney function.

And that's where we are right now. :)

Now it seems that every time I've posted about something that is medically wrong with me, my friend Kelli posts something even worse! So, in order to help out my buddy, who insists on "one-upping" me all the time, I think I'll just start feeling better and post happy things for awhile! :) (And I won't even mention the mammogram or the bone density tests I had yesterday!)