My father taught me about TIME TRAVEL: “If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!”
We are up before the roosters as we have to check in at 7:00 AM which means we are up at 5:00 AM. The surgery is at 9:30 AM but there is a lot of prep to do plus she will be “going under”,
Laser lithotripsy was invented at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1980s to remove impacted urinary stones. Optical fibers carry light pulses that pulverize the stone.
The procedure is mundane but amazing. She gets a camera, laser and micrograbber move through the urinary track into the kidney. They spot the stone and make energy level and frequency adjustments before “blasting” it into small pieces. The “blast” can be up to two joules if need be. The watts unit number 1.00 W converts to 1 J/s, one joule per second. It is the EQUAL power value of 1 joule per second but in the watts power unit alternative.
They put in a stent to assure safe passage of the broken up stone and the stent will be removed in about a week.
Did You Know? In medicine, a stent is a metal or plastic tube inserted into the lumen of an anatomic vessel or duct to keep the passageway open, and stenting is the placement of a stent. There is a wide variety of stents used for different purposes, from expandable coronary, vascular and biliary stents, to simple plastic stents used to allow the flow of urine between kidney and bladder. “Stent” is also used as a verb to describe the placement of such a device, particularly when a disease such as atherosclerosis has pathologically narrowed a structure such as an artery.
Ureteral stents are used to ensure the patency of a ureter, which may be compromised, for example, by a kidney stone. This method is sometimes used as a temporary measure to prevent damage to a blocked kidney until a procedure to remove the stone can be performed.
We arrived BUT we were waived off as the blood test last last week revealed another UTI brewing. The doctor scheduled a five day IV Antibiotic regime and the surgery was rescheduled until Tuesday of next week. Now we have to be home at certain times every day for the nurse to arrive and do the IV. What next?
We were disappointed but we still moving ahead. We got the IV delivered and the nurse will see us in the morning at 9:00 AM. The garage door now works… I could have fixed it myself for $20 but had to pay #180 as my arm just will not go above my head!
We watched some TV and crashed at 9:00 PM…I was he walking dead from yesterday!
