Also, in the midst of this, The Wife changed jobs, and with that brought new insurance, and a plan that the urologist who was supervising all the cancer stuff didn't take - necessitating a switch of "medical teams". I'm still dealing with the (minor) chaos this caused. One thing that came up from this was that the new doc wanted his own scans, and so I was back into the machines. We'd previously seen that one of my kidneys had a rather substantial stone in it, but positioned so that it wasn't causing me any discomfort. The new scan showed a stone in the other kidney that was (while still not causing me any discomfort) positioned right over the opening of the ureter ... which got the new team quite agitated (it could have shifted to block the outflow from that kidney at any time). So, I spent pretty much all of June dealing with surgery to the kidneys (they were going to deal with both on one day, but had to put off the second to a later date). I still have a stent on one side, but that's taken care of now. It wasn't fun (and it's creepy "peeing zinfandel"), but it's better than the pain of trying to pass stones.
Oh, and the other thing ...
One of the nice things about AA meetings is you can pretty much say anything in them and not shock anybody. Well, that got me into a bad habit of being "transparent" about what I was feeling/thinking and, back in February, I made the mistake of speaking honestly about "where I was" in a parent's night at a mental health facility. I soon found myself shuttled off to a hospital emergency room for a psych evaluation, and sent out for "suicidal ideation" therapy, at first with an IOP (Intensive Out Patient) program at Northwestern, and then (when that was totally pointless), to a PHP (Partial Hospitalization Program) at Rush. The latter was horrid, and I gave up on it after a week (fortunately, I was voluntarily there, so I could opt to not be there). I think I got nothing out of either program (well, we got to work with some fun art supplies in the PHP), and lost four weeks out of my life ... time I would direly miss later.
Which we'll get to soon enough ...
