Kidney stones!

The day before I came to Minnesota, I had talked to Aaron, and he'd been complaining of pain in his abdomen and left side. He'd been helping some friends of his move out of their apartment, but said he hadn't lifted anything heavy. But later that night, he was in great amounts of pain, and very close to having someone take him to the hospital. Eventually, the pain subsided, and when my parents and I arrived, he was feeling fine, and able to help us move everything.

That was about a week and a half ago. Then on Monday the 10th, Aaron calls me around 10am saying that he's in a lot of pain again, and coming home from work. He also had me start looking up clinics in the phone book (not that I was much help there), so he could go to a doctor that afternoon.

We got him into a clinic at 1pm. After a round of questions, exams, and even a tetanus shot, they sent him over to the hospital, just across the street, for a CAT scan of his abdomen. The CAT scan confirmed kidney stones, well, one of them, at least, 4mm in size. That's a little less than half a centimeter in diameter. Pretty big, if you're asking someone to push that through his urethra!

He got some pain medications from the doctor at the clinic (who probably thought Aaron was the weirdest, funniest kid with kidney stones to come in), and we went home. The next day we were back at the clinic for a urology exam. Let me tell you, he was the youngest guy in there by about 40 years. The doctor gave him some anti-inflammatory medication and something else to help things, uh, flow.

Basically, they said to go back to work and do things as normal; if anything happens and he's in pain, he needs to go back to the urologist, and they're going to shove a tube up his urethra and laser the stone to bits. Oooh, fun. I've heard that passing a kidney stone is worse than giving birth.

Thank God all the times I have been in the hospital have been self-inflicted injuries. So he is at work right now, and seemed to be doing just fine last night, so hopefully...no more pain.

In other news, I am looking for a job still. I'm going to call back the employment agency I talked to on Friday to see if they have any updates, and also contact another agency in town as well. Gotta keeps as many irons in the fire as possible, if I want this to be a quick procedure.

I'm looking for a job that is more clerical in nature, as opposed to retail and cashiering. When I work retail, I find reasons to dislike people (customers) on a daily basis, and am generally not the happiest person all the time. I think a different type of job would be better for me. So we'll see!