Kidney Stones: Or, Relationships Aren’t All Sex and Sunbeams…

The BF has been overworked lately–lots of projects due, it’s his first year at the company so he’s everyone’s bitch, etc. He had recently apologized for this and vowed to spend the weekend relaxing with me, especially after he came home at 8:30 p.m. on Thursday and fell straight asleep (I had been walking the dog, usually his job, for several days). Unfortunately, it was not to be.

Friday he came home, again after 8 p.m., and fell asleep. He woke up much later and we walked the dog together, but by then it was after midnight and I was ready for bed (he’s an insomniac normally so with his nap he was wide awake). I was getting irritated because this was the second night in a row I’d been watching tv by myself downstairs (thanks to no friends in New City) while he slept, and then going to bed alone (no sex!) while he watched tv till the early hours.

Then he woke me up at 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning and asked me to take him to the Emergency Room.

Fortunately, our house is like 1/3 of a mile from a hospital, so that was easily done, at at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, there wasn’t anyone else there. We got right in and he asked me to come back with him (which he instantly regretted as the woman began grilling him about how often he’d peed in the past few days and what color it was as well as how often he’d moved his bowels in the past few days and what the consistency of that was). I’ll spare all of you guys the details.

We went back into the treatment area where he stripped down and I helped him into one of those hospital gowns, and then they put him on I.V. before running a CT Scan to determine that his suspicion was correct and he did, indeed, have a kidney stone. Despite the fact that there was morphine in the I.V. he was continually in more pain throughout all the waiting. After he’d been given a liter of fluids they discharged him with a prescription for Percocet and mega-ibuprofen.

We went to the Walgreen’s (which is even closer to our house) to discover that the Walgreen’s across the street from the hospital is NOT 24-hour, and that to fill the prescription we’d have to go five miles away. The BF had thrown up in the parking lot of the Walgreen’s just from the pain, so he wasn’t going to go with me. I dropped him off at home and went to get the prescriptions filled.

The next two days are rather boring…me watching tv by myself downstairs, bringing him water, and him sleeping or moaning upstairs. I watched a marathon of The Bachelor on VH1 Saturday and a marathon of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America Sunday. I slept in the spare bedroom (a first in our relationship) for two days and barely saw him. He went to his regular doctor Monday to get a prescription for Vicodin and mega-naproxin.

He’s feeling better now (though he hasn’t passed the stone), but obviously still isn’t feeling great. He’s promised to not be such a workaholic and to take care of himself, but he went back to work today (Tuesday) for almost a full day. He says there is work he needs to get done, but the fact that everyone at work was shocked by his presence today leads me to believe that the majority of the pressure to do well is in his head, not his bosses’.

I demanded that he schedule himself some vacation time and try to take it easy, but his suggestion was to drive to Mexico with the previously discussed Co-Worker I Hate, Dick, with the empty prescription bottles and have them all filled up with illegal Vicodin. Okay, okay, recreational Vicodin use is fun, but seriously it will cost us over $150 in gas alone to get these pills, which seems a little less than recreational to me.

A boring, stressful weekend, with no sex for the forseeable future. Le sigh…