Seriously horrid. It's mostly a blur right now but I'll try to remember what I can so I can look back and remember it, and hopefully laugh, someday.
We began January with most of us still sick with the flu. I was also really busy with Primary stuff and getting stuff ready for the new year. We all started feeling better finally and one night after dinner Josh and I were sitting on the couch and he got up quickly and started walking around saying that his back hurt. I thought it was strange but we figured he must have hurt it lifting something at work. I gave him some ibuprofen and we didn't think much about it. But then it happened again. Right after dinner a few nights later. The first thing I thought of was his gallbladder but from what I remembered from my dad's attacks that didn't really fit. This happened a few more times and I finally told him he HAD to go to the doctor. So he made an appointment and I made sure I was able to go with him so I could actually hear what the Dr. said. (I never get much of a response when I ask, "So what did the Dr. say? You know, men.) The Dr. said it sounded like kidney stones and have him give a urine sample, which turned out to be full of blood. Not likely bloody that you would obviously notice just lots of trace blood. So he sent him over to get an MRI. Sure enough there were three lovely kidney stones and one was a biggun - 6 mm - and two were 2 mm. The window to pass them on your own is about 2-4 mm. The biggun was obviously much bigger so now we had to seek surgical options.
Josh visited a urologist and suffered for another week or so before he could get scheduled for the lithotripsy (blasting those blasted stones with sound waves.) The pain was pretty constant at this point and Josh was on a lot of different medications. He went in for the procedure on Monday, January 21st.
It ain't easy being a tall guy in a regular sized world. ;)
Several hours later we finally got him home. The Dr. had been able to blast the biggun and one of the little ones but he couldn't ever see the other little one on the x-ray and hoped that it had been hiding behind the other little one and gotten blasted too. Josh also had to have a stent placed. I'll let you google that and spare the world my explanation. Josh would describe it as the worst form of torture known to man.
The next couple of days were pretty awful for Josh. He went back to the urologist on Wednesday to have the stent removed. That in and of itself was pretty excruciating but he said he felt so much better after having it out. He felt good for a day or so and even passed quite a few fragments. We thought he was in the clear! Not so much though. Thursday night he went Home Teaching and when he got home he went straight to bed. I was upstairs with the kids and he'll usually go change and then come upstairs to say prayers and everything. I knew something was wrong when he never came upstairs. I went and checked on him and he was in some serious pain. I made sure he was dosed with his pain killers (Naproxen, which is prescription strength Aleve and had been taking his pain away for weeks just fine) and then went upstairs to put the kids to bed. I didn't hear from him again for about an hour so I figured he went to sleep. I went downstairs to check on him and the man was in tears! I felt awful for not going to check on him sooner. I'm still not sure why he didn't just yell for me. We called the urologist and he said to take some more medicine and that he thought Josh was just passing a big fragment. So I dosed him with two Tylenol with codeine and hoped that would help. After another hour or so I decided we needed to do something else. The pain was just getting worse. By this time it's about 11 or 11:30. I had already talked to Josh's mom earlier and she knew what was going on so I called her again. She had been out at the airport picking up Svend and Tally and was almost home thanks to a delay. Svend said he'd be happy to come give Josh a blessing. They were there within 10 minutes. They left for home and Josh suffered through another couple of hours. I have never seen him in so much pain. I've seen him recover from surgery (in the nether-regions, no less!); I've seen him get hit in the nose with a flying bungee cord and actually heard his nose break; I've seen him stub his toe so hard he fractured it - and I have NEVER seen him in as much pain as he was that night. He was constantly pacing or writhing around trying to find a comfortable position to lay in or puking he felt so bad. He looked like he was in labor! He finally gave in and said I could take him to the ER. I called Roxi again and she was over in a few minutes. I am so
thankful we live near family!! I don't know who I would have called at 2 a.m. otherwise.
We made it to the ER and they got him back in a room fairly quickly although it seems like it took forever at the time. It did take them forever to finally get some drugs into him. They gave him a dose of morphine and we thought for sure he'd be feeling better in no time. We waited and and waited and he still didn't feel better. After about 30-40 minutes of nothing happening I got the nurse in there to give him something else. Another dose of morphine along with another drug I can't remember the name of and we waited again. Another 30-40 minutes later and he still hadn't gotten any relief so I got the nurse in there again. She brought in some Dilaudid this time. He finally started feeling some relief and was able to sleep a little. Now that he wasn't writhing in pain they could send him for an X-ray to see if he was passing a big fragment. The X-ray came back showing nothing but the little 2mm stone the urologist had missed. Dang it!
The ER staff got him ready to be discharged around 6 am. I hadn't slept at all but Josh had been able to sleep for a few hours. During this whole time Josh had tried several times to go to the bathroom and hadn't been able to. Even though they hooked him up to IV fluids right when we got to the ER. Thankfully once his body was able to relax a little after the pain lessening he was able to go right before we left the ER and he passed several fragments. So we didn't get an official diagnosis. It could have been a ureteral spasm from having the stent and/or passing the big fragments. I think it was a combination of both but mostly the ureteral spasm because the pain would come in waves, a lot like contractions. Josh reminds me, on an almost daily basis, that he now knows what childbirth is like. Yeah. . . .
We got home from the ER just in time for the kiddos to wake up. I relieved Roxi and sent Josh to bed. Thankfully it wasn't a crazy day. I did all the Mommy stuff and finally got Sawyer in bed for a nap after lunch and was able to crash for a couple of hours while he slept. When he woke up he said he felt like a new man and felt SO much better. I'm just glad it's all over for now. At least until this other stone rears its ugly head. Hopefully before we head off to China!
As if the kidney stones weren't enough reason for the month of January to be horrid but during all of this we decided that we needed to move. Yes, we're crazy. We knew a move would be in our future but it wasn't something we'd really thought about and just figured we'd do it sometime after getting the girls home. We both had promptings that it was something we should do now so we started looking around the beginning of January. We got a realtor that does a lot of work out in areas like Bonham and Anna because Josh really wanted some land. We found a house in Trenton that was a pretty good house but it needed a lot of work and the land wasn't very pretty. There was a lot of it but it was just flat with no trees or anything. We found another house in Anna that was awesome and put an offer on it but, like I said, it was awesome and had several offers on it so ours wasn't accepted. We kept looking (and Josh kept having all these weird back pains) and found another house out in Celina. While we were looking at different places we also found a realtor closer to home to sell our house and started the process with her. I was busy packing things up and cleaning out the house to get it ready to show while all of these other things were going on. So we found this house in Celina and put an offer on it. It got accepted and we had the house inspected. After the inspection came back Josh and I both realized this was not the house for us even though we loved it. There were just going to be too many repairs and things needed. So we went back to looking. Our house went on the market the week after Josh's ER visit. It sold in one day!! So crazy. Thankfully I only had to keep it super clean for 4 or 5 days with showings and then once we accepted the offer it was over. Knowing ours had sold only made the need to find a house more urgent. We looked at an awesome house in Sachse and another one in Lucas. I loved the Sachse house. It was perfect but it was a foreclosure and it was in a neighborhood, which was not what Josh wanted. It did have a HUGE backyard for being in a neighborhood so he was willing to compromise because of that. The house in Lucas was good too but it was a smaller yard (bigger than our current house but smaller than the Sachse house), again in a neighborhood but it was closer to Allen and still in the Allen Stake. After much thought and prayer we decided that Lucas is where we should be. We put an offer on it and it was accepted. The pieces fell into place very easily and quickly and we knew we had made the right decision. Even when our mortgage guy called us a week before we were supposed to close on the Lucas house and told us he wouldn't be able to do the mortgage after all. Yes, seriously. Unbelievable! But, once again, another lender was found quickly and everything fell into place. We even ended up closing a day earlier than we had originally planned.
So January was a hard, horrid, crazy month but there were a lot of blessings in there too. On the last day of January we accepted our second referral for the adoptions and that was definitely a big one. You can read more about that here if you don't know the story already. I'm thankful for the things we learned and the many, many people who helped out with all the craziness!
By the way - if you're looking for a house or looking to sell yours I can recommend several good realtors. My mother-in-law, Roxi, of course was our first choice but she and Grandpa had planned a month long trip to Chicago right around the time we were planning on all this going down so she referred us to Donna Dickens. She was fabulous and drove all over North Texas with us to help us find a home. I felt really bad when we finally found it within 10 miles of our current home. Seriously - the mileage that woman racked up searching for houses for us! She was so super great though and we highly recommend her. For selling our home in Allen we used Karen Bradford and she was amazing as well. She helped with the staging (which is what I think sold the house so quickly) and always kept us in the loop of what was going on. Also highly recommended!!
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