Late on Friday afternoon I got on the ground to photograph some Canada Goose goslings asleep on a dock.\u00a0\u00a0 As I raised up I felt a sharp spasm in my lower back on the left side.\u00a0 This has happened before so I did not think much of\u00a0 it.\u00a0\u00a0 It did not hurt me at all when I got up or any more that evening.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
At 2:30 am on Saturday I awoke with a somewhat vicious pain in my lower back, left side.\u00a0 I assumed that it was a muscle spasm, similar to those that I used to have\u00a0nearly two\u00a0decades ago.\u00a0 My back has been great ever since I had major spinal surgery in 1991; thank you Dr. Francis Gamache Jr.\u00a0 I tried some moist heat and stretching but it did not help at all.\u00a0 I could not get comfortable in any position.\u00a0 Within an hour I began to experience a bloating pain in my lower left abdomen.\u00a0\u00a0 I tried calling my health advisor in San\u00a0Diego at 2:30am his time but his cell was off.\u00a0 I called my chiropractor in Lake Wales, waking him at 5am.\u00a0 He explained that a bad muscle spasm could affect surrounding organs and that made sense to me, but within the hour, I knew that something was not right with my body so I drove myself to the emergency room at the local hospital and forked over $500 Canadian for my visit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Twelve hours and five minutes\u00a0later I was released\u00a0after finally learning that my pain had been\u00a0caused by a\u00a0kidney stone travelling from my kidney to my bladder.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I passed the stone without any pain last night without even knowing it.\u00a0\u00a0 I am pretty much of\u00a0 a pain wuss but I will admit that this episode was quite painful.\u00a0 From speaking to other folks it seems that my pain, however, was on the mild side.\u00a0 My medical care was good but very slow.\u00a0\u00a0 I sat in pain for five hours before I saw a doctor despite complaining of increasing pain, and it was another hour until they got the IV going.\u00a0 The non-narcotic pain meds hit the spot.\u00a0\u00a0 An X-ray that showed nothing and a CAT scan that showed the small stone in the bladder took hours and hours and hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During my stay I did get to speak extensively with Dr. Cliff Oliver in San Diego and he instantly diagnosed my problem as a kidney stone\u00a0 and provided comfort and advice throughout the episode.\u00a0 I took today (Sunday) off resting and doing more than 100 posts on BirdPhotographers.Net.\u00a0\u00a0 I am feeling great and ready to get back in action at Pelee tomorrow.\u00a0 I hope that there are some birds….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late on Friday afternoon I got on the ground to photograph some Canada Goose goslings asleep on a dock. As I raised up I felt a sharp spasm in my lower back on the left side. This has happened before so I did not think much of it. It did not hurt me at all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[88,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-88","category-anecdotes","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}