Kevin's Life Exploration

I was reminded that I had not posted a blog update today, so here we go Laura has a good day at home. She is a bit tired, but she was kept semi busy today which was good for her. She did stay home most of the day. She left around 4:00 to go with Zachary for an appointment. And then at 6:00 we went to meet her friend Jamie at Tico’s for dinner. Laura spent most of the day in bed, her mom left around 3:00 and she was a real blessing for Laura. Especially since they had not really spent much time together after Laura recovered from her last hospital visit.

Tonight we are just watching some Iron Chef America shows (currently watching the catfish challange), we’ll be heading off to bed soon. Not much planned tomorrow, I’ll be working, and then Dad is coming into town, so we’ll probably go over to Grandma Nunn’s for some Pizza. Not much planned for the weekend, I want to do some re-arranging around the house, but I haven’t decided on what I want to do just yet, so that remains to be determined if I do that or not.

Around 3:15 we went in to see Laura in the recovery room. She was groggy, but was asking questions about her procedure. We talked for a bit, then a nurse came in to take out her IV and gave us instructions and then Laura got dressed to come home. We made it home around 4 or so, Laura is in bed resting. She is having some pain and just took some Tylenol III for it.

Word from the Dr is that after the sounding procedure, he did not see any stone in the left side. He did find the stone in the right side and hit it with a laser to break it apart. Then he put a stent back in her right side to heal the healing of the tube that he put the laser in. She has an appt for next Wednesday at this office to have the stent removed. We will be straining her urine for a week to collect any stones pieces that pass, and she has 1-2 days bedrest coming to her Thursday and Friday.

So all looks good here, she is in some pain, but we hope and pray it won’t last long and that the pain medication will do it’s work and let her rest. I’ll update again later today on how she is doing.

Dr came in to talk to us just now. Left side he did not say much and he did laser the stone in the right side. He did put a stent back in the right side and it will be removed next week at his office.

He also said she will be going home today! Yea!

At 2:00 they finally came for Laura. No change in the surgery plans, I figure it will be 1 or maybe 2 till we get to speak to the doctor, then a bit after that before we can see her again. I grabbed a ba of chips for lunch as the cafeteria was closed, now Jan and I are sitting in the surgery waiting room.

Another update after we talk to the doctor, if my battery holds out

They want to take another x-Ray of the left side – Laura thinks she heard that maybe they could not see the stone, so maybe it passed? We will know more after the xray.

We are in preop right now. Laura ha her IV in and the have given her drugs for nausia and sedation. We are just waiting now for the Dr to get done with another surgery, then it is Laura’s turn. She is a little bit nervous, but otherwise doing fine.

Even though Laura had to endure going to the bathroom a lot last night, I am sure she is happy that the day has finally come. She is still sleeping right now, but we’ll be taking her back up to the hospital for an 8:00am appointment for the “sounding” to break apart one of the stones, and then a laser treatment on another stone to break it apart. Then they will remove the stints. Or at least that is the plan.

Laura’s Mom came down yesterday and is staying at LJ’s house, and Laura’s Dad is here as well of course. Last night Justin (LJ’s boyfriend) cooks steaks for us at there apartment and Laura got a chance to catch up with her mom, since she left before Laura got her bearings in the hospital.

So, the plan for today, Take Laura, and then we wait for the procedure to be over. And since it is several procedures, it could be several hours. I plan to just hang around the hospital until I can see her in the recovery room. We pray that there are no problems or complications and that all go smoothly, and that she can come back home to sleep tonight.

I’ll post news as I hear it.

For some of you this is a “first contact,” and for some of you this is a recurring update. Whichever category you are, please allow me a moment to share with you my need for your prayers over the next week:

Yesterday I found out from the urologist that I will have the kidney stones and the ureteral stents removed next Wednesday, August 26. Yea!

Today I visited the infectious disease doctor who treated me for sepsis after my original procedure in July, when I got so sick and was in ICU for 9 days. This doctor explained to me that when the urologist begins “pounding” on the kidney stones to break them up, bacteria will be released – that’s a given. SO, the idea is to do as much as they medically know how to minimize the possibility of my getting sepsis again. To that end, he is prescribing mega doses of antibiotics in advance of the procedure; beyond that, there’s nothing that man nor science can do. He said to me, “That’s the very best I know to do.” I responded to him, “That’s all I ask. We’ll leave the rest up to the Lord.” And he agreed. I really like this doctor, Dr. Montes. He’s straight forward, he gives you his complete attention, he takes his time, and he has an attitude that says that his interest is the patient’s best interest.

Please pray for a successful procedure next Wednesday (don’t know the specific time yet, but it WILL be in the morning). It is my desire to recover and resume my responsibilities at home and at work as quickly as possible.

You are welcome to check Kevin’s blog for an update Wednesday after the procedure at http://razorsdomain.wordpress.com.

Thank you all for your prayers, your visits, your kind thoughts, your gifts, your meals, your friendships. I am a VERY blessed individual!

Here is an update from the lady herself!

Hi Everyone!

I’m sure Kevin will update his blog during this time as well, so once again, thank you for your prayers thus far and please know that I will be ever so thankful for your prayers during this next stage of my recovery.

From Blogger Pictures

We’ve all had those tech support calls that we use as examples of pure idiots and I still dread each and every call that I have to make to a tech support line, or any customer service call for that matter. But, for once I actually had good call!

Last night after doing my running around and picking up something for supper, Zach informed me that the internet was down. So I messed with a few things and did my own troubleshooting, but I could not tell if my router had taken a dump or if it was an AT&T DSL problem.

So after a bit of testing and troubleshooting, I called AT&T Internet support. Luckily I got a person I could understand, although he was not really technically “smart”, he was a pretty good phone support person. We went through the normal checks, “open up internet explorer, what does it say” type stuff. We then progressed to opening a DOS box and pinging www.yahoo.com. Luckily we didn’t do too much of the “easy” troubleshooting as I had told him I had already done all that. It was funny too when he asked me what version of Windows I was running, when he asked he rambled off the different versions, after he was done I said I was running Windows 7… “What’s that?” I told him it was the new version of windows… “oh, ok”, then I told him it was very much like Vista, but better and to just treat it like I have vista.

Anyway, after we ended up plugging my computer directly into the DSL modem, did a reset on it, logged into the modem and looked at a few screens, he decided to escalate me to tier 2 support. 3 minutes later I was talking to tier 2, this person was not as easy to understand, but her accent was not too bad, so I caught most of what she was saying. She did say there was reports of a problem in our area, but it had not been confirmed. As she was checking on things, I was poking around the DSL modem configuration and found a page that was saying the “ATM” was down, so I told her, then she tried to connect to my modem, and said she could not. We did a few more things and once she “reported” the problem, then the outage was confirmed (I guess I was the report to confirm there was a problem). So, there was not ETA on a fix, but I told her I had gotten the info I needed, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t my problem and that they knew about it and I was off to relax. Sometime during the night it did come back on and we had internet access again this morning.

So, overall this was probably the best tech support call I had ever made. The personnel was polite and didn’t give me too much hassle when I told them I knew what I was doing and didn’t need to do basic tests. Tier 2 support didn’t even have me do anything at all, I just told them what all I had done, and they went with that. I was pretty satisfied with the result. I’ll probably never have a good support call like that again, but at least I did get one in my lifetime.