Pebbles Huddlestone's Hurry Up And Wait Diary '09

How sad is it that I haven't blogged one time yet in 2009? What is up with that?

Well, lots of things are up with that, namely root canals, kidney stones, ovarian cysts and other painful things like trying to sell our house (so far, I think that is the most painful of them all, so much do I hate moving). Yes, 2008 ended with me chewing all of my holiday goodies on the right side of my mouth because I hadn't yet made it to the endodontist (scared and then also too much ice on the road the day of my first appointment) for the dreaded root canal to fix my bad tooh on the left side of my mouth. So, January 12th, my mommy took me to Decatur for my very first root canal. It was nice of my mother to drive me. And the procedure itself was actually not that bad. Really. It wasn't any worse than getting an extended filling. And it didn't hurt afterwards. Until the next day.

And then it hurt for three weeks. All of the time. And I couldn't chew on the left side of my mouth still. I took constant ibuprofen and listened to my mother warn me that I would ruin my stomach. The dentist in town gave me an antibiotic in case I had an infection. It still hurt. I finally went in to have the tooth filed down and prepped for a crown and that seemed to fix it but the three weeks in between sucked. Evidently I grind my teeth at night and that had aggrivated it. Nice. I cause my own pain and misery while I sleep.

Enter pelvic pain. Yes, whilst I was enduring the tooth pain, I started to have pretty sharp pain in my ovary area. My right ovary. After a few weeks of this, I couldn't sleep for three nights and decided I better see the doctor. That was the first week of February. Two days later I had a CT scan of my entire abdomen for which I had to drink 40 ounces of water AND be injected with dye. I peed four times while waiting for them to call me for the test. I almost peed on the table during the test. I thought I might die from the pain of having to pee so badly (or at least of embarrassment when I peed everywhere). Leave it to me to have pain during a CT scan which is a relatively painless procedure.

It took 6 days for the doctor to call me with the results of the scan:
"Laura, you have 4 kidney stones and a large ovarian cyst."

"Ok, well, that's why I feel like crap then, huh."

I went back to the doctor the next day. She was unconcerned with the stones, which were in my left kidney. Said they were small and I would pass them without noticing. She said that the cyst (on my left ovary, even though the pain was on my right side) was 5cm, big enough to need to be removed, and they called the ob/gyn for me to try to get me in soon.

It was a week before I could get in. Nevermind that I was in pain. And even then I had to visit my ob/gyn in her Savoy office instead of her Charleston office. You know, Charleston which is 10 minutes from my house as opposed to Savoy which is 45 minutes from my house. But whatever. My mommy took me.

While I was there they did the regular yearly exam and took blood to check for the ovarian cancer marker. The ob/gyn examined me to find.... Nothing. She did not think that I could have a 5cm ovarian cyst. She said that she would be able to feel it if I did have one and she couldn't feel it. Plan of action: ultrasound in 4 weeks to check on the girls. Come with a full bladder. Awesome.

In the meantime... we put our house on the market and it started showing immediately. It showed more than 10 times in 2 1/2 weeks. We were exhausted from getting the house ready and exhausted from keeping it tidy. (They say that if you do something for 3 weeks it will become a habit. Does that mean that I will make my bed from now on and swiffer the floors every day? I doubt it.) Also in the meantime, while the pelvic pain had dissipated some, I had started to have back pain. Sometimes sharp, shooting pain and sometimes crampy, achey pain. On both sides. The pain was directly where my kidneys are. Kidneys that are harboring stones, or at least one of them was.

I did get a letter in the mail that the test for the ovarian cancer marker was negative, so that made me feel better. But then I got a call from the ob/gyn office to say that my pap came back abnormal. And they were sending the sample out to check for how bad it was. What? Well, a pap smear only checks for one thing: HPV which causes cervical cancer. And HPV is an STD. WTH? Yeah. And they would call me in a WEEK to tell me what was going on. (Ok, I will spare you the details here, but suffice it say I was sufficiently freaked out and we had some heated discussions at home that mostly ended in us not talking to each other much for a few days.)

Well, two days ago, just shy of 3 weeks on the market, our house got an offer from a woman who is buying with cash. My mother-in-law, our realtor, calls her a Cash Buyer. This is supposed to be a really good thing because it means that she will not need to get a loan and we don't have to worry about trouble on that end of the sale. This lady looked at our house 3 times last week and never with a lot of notice, either, but we managed to get the dog out and get the kids out and all of that so that the Cash Buyer could keep looking the house over. After her viewing on Saturday, we were told that she really liked it and wanted to see the utilities reports. That's a good sign that you're going to get an offer. And we waited and waited, and then finally on Monday the call came in. She had offered lower than we were hoping but it was CASH and also she only wanted a partial inspection. Her offer was non-negotiable.

Fine. We accepted the offer and said that we would not be fixing anything for her in the house due to the low offer but we would take it. And we all signed on it. That was Monday. And we made an offer on the house we have been waiting to offer on for a month now. And it was accepted. Great.

Yesterday, Tuesday, Shad was home with Maia (who developed a lovely stomach flu onMonday night, of course). He received no fewer than 7 calls from his mother, the realtor, about the inspection. The Cash Buyer first decided that she didn't want any inspection at all. Weird, but ok. Later in the day she wanted not only an inspection, but a full inspection, which was contrary to the paper that we all signed detailing her offer and her wish for a partial inspection only. But if we didn't go ahead and grant her the full inspection then it would look like we have something to hide, which we don't have. So, we were forced to allow the full inspection. Well, she wanted it today, Wednesday. Fine. Whatever. And now we are still waiting tonight to hear how the inspection went and with every passing minute my stomach feels sicker and sicker that this strange, wishy-washy woman is going to find some reason to not buy our house.

But I've had other things to occupy my mind like...

The pap results. Which came back negative for HPV. They called me yesterday, one week to the day, as promised. It had been a false positive. Big relief and WHY did that have to happen in the middle of all this? I apologized to my husband for accusing him of giving me a disease. Not that I really blamed him, but I still accused him, you know?

Today, one month after my first dr. appt. and CT scan, I went back to the doctor for the stones. I have been drinking liters of water and cranberry juice, visiting the girls room more than I wish to in an effort to float the suckers out in some kind of tidal wave, but I still have pain in my kidneys. The stones have not passed. The doctor said I should see the urologist. They called for me to try to get me in soon. Sound familiar?

The urologist's office said to come RIGHT AWAY. As in, right that minute. Come now to our office and see our doctor, poor dear girl who is in pain and needs a professional opinion quickly. I went. I peed in the cup. I wore the paper tablecloth. I saw my kidneys (and all of my other organs) on a Dell flat screen where my CT scan from one month ago was detailed in excellent black and white, slices of my kidneys displayed to reveal, AH HA, stones in both kidneys.

And the doctor said:

"I'm not convinced that your pain is from your kidney stones."

WTH? I have pain in my kidneys, and there are stones in them. Why would the pain NOT be from the kidney stones? He says that the location of the stones are not painful spots. Well, right, and when I had the CT scan done a month ago they DIDN'T HURT YET. But now they do. Quite a bit, actually. So, he said he will do lithotripsy on them to crush them into powder so they will pass. But he doesn't know that it will end my pain. He gave me a prescription for Vicodin.

I am confused. But the longer I sit here today and think about it and the more my back hurts, the more I think that I will call and schedule the lithotripsy. Of course, like it's the rocko-planes at the county fair, they only have the super high-tech travelling lithotripsy machine at our country bumpkin hospital every other week. So, I'll have to wait because it was just here this Monday.

And that has been the saga of my first 9 weeks of 2009. I was hoping that by the time I finished this writing that I could end it with news that the inspection of our house went well and that we will be moving in a few weeks. (Did I mention that the Cash Buyer also wants to close in 3 weeks and we said ok because we had to? THREE WEEKS! Well, the bank isn't sure they can have it all ready in 3 weeks, but we'll see.) Alas, as of almost 7pm, we have no word on the inspection.

And I am still waiting...