Less than 20 hours after arriving home in PNG, I found myself at the clinic. I was reluctant and embarrassed to have to go in, but the pain I was in was different and it wasn’t because of the 40ish hours of travel I had just completed.
\nIt was a kidney stone.
\nIn the end it was related to the 40ish hours of travel I had just completed since I had been in a dry airplane cabin for most of that and I hadn’t kept myself well-hydrated.
\nThat kidney stone was “an ugly one and of reasonable size” according to the doctor, but really it was small compared to just about anything else. (For an actual size, the report hasn’t come back from Australia and I didn’t think to get my ruler out in the moment.)
\nThis was my first and I hope last experience with a kidney stone; the pain was staggering. I will leave summer in Texas well-hydrated which means having a water bottle on the ride to the airport. I will get up and get extra water on the flights even when it means I have to ask the person next to me to move. I won’t drink coffee when traveling to try and reset my time clock. I figure these are also relatively small things that will matter much.
\nThere are lots of small things that matter much in life. I had some time to think about them in my day of recovery…things like brushing your teeth so that you don’t have to have a root canal, forgiving now instead of stewing and risking relationships, greetings teenagers with a smile on a Monday morning when they’re looking a little tired, making expectations clear at the beginning before big problems come up…okay, I might have started thinking of school. Thankfully I was back at work soon and tackling the things of school instead of a kidney stone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Less than 20 hours after arriving home in PNG, I found myself at the clinic. I was reluctant and embarrassed to have to go in, but the pain I was in was different and it wasn’t because of the 40ish hours of travel I had just completed. It was a kidney stone. In the end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":860,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/860"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/robyn-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}