So then, there's this

I haven't been posting a lot lately as the real world has increasingly been distracting me. Plus I've been scrambling to get stuff done. Not that that's a entirely bad thing...

But the spine looks GREAT!

Part of the whole real world distraction is prepping and planning for still another surgical intervention!

...Son of a-

This time out under the knife is to get rid of my useless left kidney. As you can see in the photo, the kidney is no longer a kidney. It's a just a big old bag of stale piss using up half my abdomen. I'm getting it taken out August 28th.

For those interested, I got a blockage in my left ureter to the bladder back in maybe 2012, and the kidney had itself an aneurysm and ceased functioning sometime in spring of 2013. I had two operations in the summer of 2013. At that time, it was hoped (by me) that the kidney would just atrophy away. (They wanted to remove it).

No such luck. It's probably been trying to do it's job and slowly filling up with urine, with nowhere for the urine to go, so that now it is swelled up enough for me to notice it.

I noticed around the holidays that I was experiencing more and more discomfort. When I went in for my physical in April, it had become an off-and-on knife in my side. It's still not painful all the time, but it's getting to be a regular ache with knife-in-my-side pain when I'm lying down more and more frequently. Which means I'm not getting much sleep unless I self-medicate with booze and dope. So, it's time to get the thing out.

I should tell you this story. I was at the urologist for the final consultation, and the examination room walls are paper thin. In the exam room to one side was an elderly couple talking to their doctor about ED and viagra, and in another exam room was a mentally challenged man I'd sat next to in the waiting room, who probably was getting his very first prostate exam ever. The conservations got mashed up together into one and sounded like:

Doc: "Sometimes after orgasm, the erection will not immediately go away-"

Patient: "OW!"

Doc: "-you see that the erection-"

Patient: "OWW!"

Doc: "-the erection-"

Patient: "OWWW! CUT IT OUT!"

You get the idea. When my doctor came in, I'm wiping away tears from laughing, and he thinks I'm distraught, getting ready to reassure me. No, that's not it, doc, you should have been in here a couple minutes ago.

So, anyway, my urologist, who is Korean-American, is very inscrutable and stoic in demeanor. I think I've gotten him to laugh once. Maybe. Hard to tell.

But when he started talking about the procedure, he got excited and animated because he gets to use the DaVinci robot on me to extract the kidney.  He's gesturing and mimicking his hand movements waldo-ing the robot controls.

"Wow, it sounds like you get to drive the Maserati!" I observe.

He laughs, pauses and says "Yeah, and you're a good road."

He could not have thought of anything more comforting to say to me.

So, I got lots of shit to do the next two weeks. I'm not giving up my bronze casting class. I have the first day to inform them of the situation, cancel the next class, Labor Day weekend to recover, and back at it. They say it should be six weeks to get back to normal.

They don't know I'm a fucking werewolf that will recover in about an hour. But I will baby myself for the full six weeks. I may be a monster, but I'm not stupid.

More later as the surgery day gets closer.

Oh, right, I did manage to get some cast class pieces done. Here's the crude first-take pic until I take better ones: