…that I learned the path of resolution to a health issue that had been causing me problems for six weeks.

In early September of 2008, I’d gotten really sick, in pain to the point of not being able to sleep for more than 45 minutes in a row, and couldn’t keep food down (during the three months that this ordeal lasted, I lost 30 pounds, and that’s with me doing almost no exercise at all). During this period, I’d made five visits to my primary care physician, who’d consistently misdiagnosed the problem and used his misdiagnosis to lead me down the totally incorrect path towards recovery. After the fifth visit, he finally decided it was worth a little deeper investigation, at which point we scheduled a scan of my abdomen.

The scan revealed the problem instantly (it turns out, it would have probably revealed it instantly six weeks earlier as well). I got a call from his office very shortly after the scan (they asked me to stay in the waiting room so he could go over the results with me). They scheduled me that afternoon with a specialist, one who deals with kidney problems.

The problem, and the source of the constant pain, it turns out, was a kidney stone, just outside my left kidney, that had grown large enough to completely block all fluid out of the kidney. The kidney was, for all intents and purposes, completely non-functional. We didn’t know at the time whether or not function would return.

I will interject for one moment here, to note that the specialist is one of the best doctors I have ever seen. He was clear, direct, honest and hopeful without getting my hopes up. He said, in essence, “we’re going to need to do surgery right away just to take pressure off the kidney. It may not come back, but if we don’t do this surgery, you’ll definitely lose the kidney, and will probably die.” We scheduled this surgery for later in the week.

The effect of the surgery was dramatic. I still had trouble sleeping, but it was nothing like before. It was the first time I was able to sleep for more than an hour at a time, and though there was an 8-day recovery period that was fairly unpleasant, it was well worth it.

The next few months went well, though I still wasn’t up for eating much and found it difficult to exercise, and I knew another surgery would be coming. There were freakout moments, because the first surgery was only to do fluid release, and the stone still had to be removed down the line. Because of its location, they couldn’t do the normal approach of breaking it up with sound waves (it was hidden behind a bone) or anything else, so surgery again.

But that wasn’t urgent. It just needed to be done. We scheduled it for mid-December. Like the prior surgery, it had an eight day recovery period, and left me a bit exhausted for the next week or so after that, but all in all, it was just incredibly successful.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that the kidney had started to return to function. The doctor was amused because the radiologist had written this pessimistic note about how horrible it was that the kidney was only at half function, without knowing that I had had no kidney function just a few weeks before.

This June, we had a follow-up. Everything was not just good, but great. He doesn’t want to see me again for a year, and there were no signs of any stones returning or any kidney problems.

I’m writing this for a few reasons. Even though I lost 30 lbs by the time New Year’s Day had come around, I’ve gained a lot of it back — I had gained almost 25 lbs back as of a few weeks ago, which is one of the reasons I’ve been pushing myself so hard lately.

I’m realizing a few things about the health issues I experience. The diabetes is bad enough, but every medicine I take for it includes weight gain as a possible side effect. So I have to work twice as hard to get the same benefit as everyone else, which is why just maintaining my weight is difficult enough.

So I’m working at it, thinking about what I eat and why, and thinking about how much if it I eat, and realizing that one thing that’s going to be true for me is that I will pretty much always be hungry whether I actually need food or not. Eating to the point where I am not hungry, for me, is overeating. My set point has been so screwed up by decades of eating poorly, followed by more than a decade of being on medications which screw with my gastronomy, that I have to just learn to change how I think about food.

So here I am, getting ready to get on the treadmill again, even though there are other things I’d rather be doing, not because I want to look good, not because I want to fit into something, but really because I don’t want to die early just because I didn’t try to become more fit while I had the chance.

At the end of that illness, I actually felt really good. I could move better. I could sleep better. I was just better.

I need to get back to that again.

So off I go.

P.S. this is some of the other, non-exercise stuff, I’ve been doing lately:

First, music:

Then, photos: