Were any of you driving on I-20 just outside of Atlanta Monday night around 6?\u00a0 Did you happen to see a woman pulled over to the side of the road throwing up behind her van?\u00a0 THAT WAS ME.\u00a0 Yuck.<\/p>\n
I was on my way from Birmingham to Anderson with 2 of my 3 girls.\u00a0 I was going to pick up my middle child who had been in Atlanta with my in-laws for a little one on one time.\u00a0 Everything was going along great.\u00a0 We had just wrapped up a wonderful weekend with family in Birmingham and it was time to get back home and back to the daily grind.\u00a0 Tooling down the interstate, I was mentally planning my week and then it hit me.\u00a0 BAM!\u00a0 A kidney stone was on the move.\u00a0 I have had kidney stones for about 8 years now so I knew exactly what was going on.\u00a0 It is a pain like no other.\u00a0 The pain is so acute and so intense, it could level a lumberjack without breaking a sweat.\u00a0 Labor can’t even throw a rock at kidney stone pain.\u00a0 Trust me – I speak from experience.\u00a0 Unfortunately I was in the middle of traffic on the interstate with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.\u00a0 All of my tricks for easing the pain were no good behind the wheel.\u00a0 Robert was not with me so I didn’t have anyone else to drive.<\/p>\n
Someone, however,\u00a0 was watching out for me.\u00a0 I managed to make it safely to the hotel where my in-laws were.\u00a0 I dropped off the girls and the dog (did I mention that I had the dog?) with my father-in-law.\u00a0 I climbed in the car with my mother-in-law and we headed for the ER.\u00a0 By the time we got there I was crawling on the floor begging every pair of feet I encountered for morphine.\u00a0 Of course, the ER was FULL.\u00a0 Packed to the brim with miserable people waiting to hear their name called.\u00a0 I’m sure I scared my mother-in-law to death.\u00a0 I am usually a strong person.\u00a0 I can usually keep a level head.\u00a0 Kidney stones reduce me to a shaky moaning heap of a person.<\/p>\n
Six hours later, an angel of mercy finally arrived.\u00a0 My angel was named Jenny.\u00a0 I swear she was glowing like the Madonna in a stained glass window.\u00a0 She was carrying a smile in a syringe and relieved my agony in a matter of seconds.\u00a0\u00a0 She had been the only triage nurse on duty for over 10 hours.\u00a0 She had gotten to me as soon as she possibly could.\u00a0 The people in charge of budget cuts should be forced to spend a shift in her shoes.\u00a0 They’d never cut money from the nursing staff budget again.\u00a0 Enough on the soapbox….<\/p>\n
The point is that we all survived the ordeal.\u00a0 My girls and I are back home and I am waiting for this stone to pass.\u00a0 I have everything I need to get through the next phase.\u00a0 My parents are here with me for a few days because Robert is out of town on business (these things ALWAYS happen when he’s out of town) and I have a bottle of relief if I need it.\u00a0 I am supposed to rest and take it easy over the next couple of days.\u00a0 Do you know how hard that is for me?\u00a0 Tres difficile!<\/p>\n
It is all a brutal reminder that no matter how much I organize, clean and plan, I am not in charge.\u00a0 Kidney stones or not, we must all admit that, in the grand scheme of things, we are not in charge.\u00a0 We need someone to look out for us.\u00a0 We need angels of mercy.\u00a0 We cannot do this dance of life alone.\u00a0 We are mere mortals and despite what we humans think, we do NOT<\/strong> know everything.<\/p>\n PS – To Jenny – I will forever love you and I am forever in your debt.\u00a0 If you suffer from kidney stones, you know why I love this woman.\u00a0 It’s not weird, it’s just common sense!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Were any of you driving on I-20 just outside of Atlanta Monday night around 6?\u00a0 Did you happen to see…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[144,143],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts","tag-atlanta","tag-kidney-stones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}