California - Day one!

We're going to start this story back in January when I ended up in the ER. I started feeling some pain during church, went to urgent care and was diagnosed with a kidney infection. I got some pain medication but couldn't keep it down and the pain just kept getting worse and worse, so I went to the ER. They couldn't find a stone on the ultrasound so they kept the diagnosis of kidney infection. On top of whatever meds they had given me at the hospital (awesome) they gave me an Rx for some nausea medicine to help me keep the pain meds down. Well, that seemed to work. I took the pain meds for another day and was fine after that.

Jump to March with what I thought was a UTI leading to a CT which showed multiple kidney stones! Other than the UTI I hadn't had any problems since January. I got the results on the day before we were supposed to leave for California and, I'm not kidding, about 5 minutes later I started feeling something like I had in January. Luckily that subsided and I was OK for the night. But the next day, about 5 minutes after I got to work I had to leave because the pain was so bad. From what I hear, I looked like I hurt too.

All I could think about was how in 10 hours I was supposed to be getting on a 6 hour flight! What was I going to do if I was still in this amount of pain as we were flying over Kansas? I took my pain and nausea meds, dozed a bit (they make me sleepy!) and finalized the packing when I could. At some point I got news that our flight was delayed by 3 hours. Three hours. So, now, on top of flying while passing a (some?) kidney stone(s), I was going to have to figure out how to entertain two kids for three hours in the airport and hope they crashed as soon as they got on the plane. Sounds fun right? No. I was freaking out. I was starting to think that we were not meant to get on the plane. (Was it going to crash?) Luckily, a few minutes later I got another message that the delay had been changed to 30 minutes. (Did someone accidentally type an extra 0 in the delay box?) THANK GOD! That I could handle. And actually it worked out great because it gave us time to get a sit down meal instead of grabbing something to try to eat on the plane while 15 month old hands tried to grab it at the same time.

On the way to the airport I took another pill and happily floated through security and all the way to the plane. The flight went very smoothly. After getting Mia to go to sleep by letting her listen to her night-night CD (Baby Mozart) on Nate's iPod, then getting him to fall asleep listening to his night-night CD (Now That's What I Call Disney), Peter and I actually got to watch an entire movie (National Treasure - it was the only thing I could think of at the last minute while heavily medicated that I knew we'd agree on)! Mia woke up again just as we were about to start our descent. My mom and Jerry were there to pick us up and, other than a short scare that our luggage was lost, we quickly made our way to the car.

Welcome to California!