Jolt Country

Print out a few kidneys for me. Probably gonna need some spares hanging around pretty soon.

Woke

Mina comes home tomorrow (11/20).

I go in to get my kidney removed on 12/12 (12/12).

This has been... A PINBACK FAMILY HEALTH UPDATE OF A DAY.

What dietary modifications, if any, do your doctors recommend as a single kidney person?

I would say take whatever I was eating and drinking the first 53.5 years of my life, and then just do the opposite of that.

pinback wrote: Tue Nov 19, 2024 3:10 pm Mina comes home tomorrow (11/20).

I go in to get my kidney removed on 12/12 (12/12).

This has been... A PINBACK FAMILY HEALTH UPDATE OF A DAY.

Enjoy the shit out of those 3 weeks.

What are the odds Pinback would have surgery on my kid's birthday? Actually I just ran the numbers. It's one in 365.

It is also the day that DJ Larry's love, "Katie", left him for good, leaving him an empty, dying shell of a man.

I've nicknamed my cancerous kidney "Katie".

Mina is home, watching her tablet in bed instead of going to sleep like she should.

I'm sittin' here losing at tetr.io with Family Guy reruns on in the back.

Just this one, tiny little sliver of time, just this moment, you would think nothing had happened to any of us the past three months.

Let's enjoy this one little moment, please.

Things continue apace. Mina barely has to use her walker anymore (though we still need to be close by when she's up, as there's still some wobbly-ness and weakness) and other than having no hair and a giant scar running across her head, most times you'd be hard-pressed to tell anything happened at all.

She goes to therapies downtown twice a week, for occupational and physical therapies. The trick is to explain to the therapists what she was like before. The PT lady always comments on her stiff joints, but that was there from the start, so our job as parents is to just point out to them what's different. Mainly nothing's different, but everything is slowed down, weaker, shakier, etc.

Except for one interesting thing, which is that she can't see stuff on her left side! She has to physically turn her head to see something that's over there. The most interesting part of this is that they say that's a common effect of the surgeries she had, and it's not that the eyesight is affected, but her brain is not processing that part of the information stream. Weird, man. There's plenty of hope that this, along with all the other effects, will be overcome as the weeks and months pass. For me, I'm just amazed she's already as together as she is.

(Oh, also one other thing, she has "accidents" at night sometimes, which never used to happen, so while we never had to use diapers when we first adopted her, we do now.)

I am still scheduled for the 12th. Who knows what happens after that. If anything!

Q: will they let you take the offending organ home in a jar?

"Let" me? No. Now, let's talk price.

Most organs aren't removed in one piece. Due to the popularity of laparoscopic surgeries, things like kidneys are usually cut up so that they can be removed more easily. Maybe they don't cut up organs with cancer, so maybe you'll get lucky (?). My wife recently had a cyst removed from the top of her head and prior to the procedure the doctor was all, "sure, you can have it." After the procedure he just said it broke apart and there was nothing to see. I've told that story to a few people and they all said, "yeah, me too!" Obviously every medical procedure is different so your kidney may vary.

They massacred my gall bladder. Just like how Flack said. Shredded it. SHREDDDDDDEERRRRRR

I was kinda joking to take the edge off. Having kidney cancer and upcoming surgery must bring on a load of anxiety and dread. Making dumb jokes might help, if only a little.

THE
SAD CLOWN
AARDVARK

All of my anxiety and dread was used up by Mina. Now it's all gravy!

(I probably can't eat gravy anymore.)

Yeah but with that extra space in there you can probably have room to get a backup liver installed!

"Quivering innards" is my favorite phrase of the week!