Happy New Year

We have been in a chemo hiatus for about a month now. It was planned to last only a couple weeks -the Drs gave Kev Christmas and New Years weeks off which allowed us to travel north and see family and friends. We had a great visit with Kevin’s parents and brothers and their families in New Mexico. Unfortunately his sisters (and families) weren’t able to join. Our children, Kelden and Nick, enjoyed a wonderful day skiing at Santa Fe with their grandfather, uncles and cousins. We then traveled further north to Colorado to visit with my sister and her family. Some of Kev’s buddies from CU even pulled together a last minute dinner party. We took Kelden to a campus visit of CU earlier that day and even though we spent almost 2 hours walking around a very snowy campus in temps below 20F, she really enjoyed it. Of course having dinner later that night with 4 alumni and a CU professor didn’t hurt its chances either.
Kev’s been having a rough time these last 6 weeks due to the development of kidney stones. Although he has never had these before, many of his colleagues have and he’s been receiving lots of desk chair advice and sharing horror stories of “attacks”. After getting scans last week, his Urologist (yet another specialist to add to his collection) confirmed 4 spikey stones, 2mm, 3mm, 6mm, & 12mm, distributed amongst both kidneys and the 6mm residing in the ureter (tube connecting kidney to bladder). For those not metric savvy, 12mm is approximately ½ inch…sort of explains the pain and discomfort he’s been complaining about…
This morning the Urologist went in and extracted the 6mm stone, installed shunts in the ureters and ultra-sounded (more like blasted) those remaining in the kidneys. The shunt will prevent the kidneys from getting blocked and “backing-up”. The shunts are temporary and will be removed later via their attached strings. Amazingly they were able to do all this without any incisions – so Kev has nothing to show for the procedure except for some serious bruising on his back. Kinda makes one wonder what our pioneering ancestors did about these little buggers...