The side effects of Greg's chemo are cumulative and take longer to go away after each round the longer he's on them. This last week, he finished a brutal round on Monday, and we ended up in the ER on Tuesday evening due to kidney stones. It came on suddenly around 1:30pm. He was supposed to go into work that afternoon. He tried but turned around half way there and barely made it back. Meds didn't do much, and the pain got too bad, so after I got the middle school girls home after youth group, I came home and drove Greg to the ER. We were there for three hours. I took the hand photos there because the color was so shocking. They confirmed with a CT scan that it was indeed a kidney stone and that he has "a bunch" up in his left kidney. They pumped him full of morphine and sent us home. He felt just terrible all week and through the weekend--both kidney pain and all the chemo effects. It was brutal. He was miserable and down, and we were all just feeling pretty low.
The next day I got an alert from our credit card company that we had fraud on our account. Sure enough, someone had tried to use our number three times. They closed our account, and I spent the day trying to change all our automatic and re-occurring payments (at least 20). Of course, our new cards will take a week to come, so I had to change everything over to our Costco visa, and I'll have to switch it all back to our Alaska card once we receive the new ones. Such a pain.
The next day Kari woke up with a swollen jaw and cheek. Her wisdom tooth surgery had been over 3 weeks ago, so I called and had to take her back in to the oral surgeon. Thankfully, they saw on the xray that there was a tiny bone fragment that was left behind and prescribed antiobiotics, in hopes that it would just dissolve and go away on it's own. It was just another thing in a week that didn't need more "things."
Greg had a follow-up appointment at a urologist two days after the ER, and he learned that his "stone burden" was great in that left kidney, and he would need surgery to remove all the stones. The problem was that he was finishing up chemo, so surgery would need to wait. They set up an appointment for a month later and sent him home with instructions to filter all his urine until he passed the stone. We just couldn't believe this was all happening. Not even done with chemo and needing another completely unrelated surgery.
The other issue causing me stress was our cell phone service. I started the process of switching carriers on Monday, and it turned into a huge fiasco. I was on the phone with T-Mobile for almost 10 hours that week, trying to get our phones to work and to get the promotions they promised. I lost hours of sleep stressing about it, too, especially when we had no working phones for a day. I should have just gone into the store and taken care of it all in person. Lesson learned! Switching should save us about $100 a month...eventually. :-)
Sunday was the Super Bowl, and we had a rather strange mix of foods requested by various members of our family--boneless wings, tater tots, jello jigglers, berry bagels and cream cheese frosting/dip, bean dip and chips. Greg had 4 canker sores, yet another unpleasant side effect of chemo, but Tiffany had given us a tip about a product they have used. I went out and got some, and he was able to eat without as much pain in his mouth.
That night, as we were getting ready for bed, he called out for me from the bathroom. I came running in. He was fine, but he had just passed 7 kidney stones! Crazy! The biggest one looked to be about 5-6mm. They weren't tiny! It was very exciting. :-) The next morning he woke up feeling so much better. Chemo stuff was all still bad, but his kidney pain was gone! He said he felt "almost like a new man."
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