He has his own suite as part of our home and on Monday morning about 4am, he came and woke me out of a lovely sleep and said there was something wrong... Deep, nasty pain in his lower back and left side. Hmmm.... Appendix? He said he had been in pain since about 2am and couldn't wait any longer. So we got dressed and his father and I drove him to the Emergency....
Now of course he is old enough to get himself on whatever list to wait for a Doc to see him and evaluate what the problem was... We sat with him for awhile and then decided that $4 an hour to park was pretty costly for us to just sit, so we left him waiting in Emergency with of course his cell phone to call us if needed or to play games or other stuff while he waited. We went home.
It's not very exciting waiting in Emergency and at home I can be much more productive doing crochet or working on my Etsy Store. I finally gave him a call around 10am but had to leave a message cause he wasn't answering -- I wondered, maybe we should go back to the Hospital but as I was trying to decide to do something or wait, the phone rang and he said to come pick him up.... We did.
He was not quite 'there' (drugs for the pain) and he said the doc put him on a list for an emergency CAT scan and they would call him when to come back --- they suspected Kidney Stones.
Whew! and OH OH...
At least with that news I had a focus -- you know how MOMS are, right? Even if you can't do anything about it, you have to find something to do to fix the problem....
Research. First what are kidney stones, how do you get them, how do you fix them, how do you prevent them ???? Kept me busy the rest of the day reading web pages and learning about them. And I did learn some of what I can do to fix the problem -- Food.
More things to learn!
A change in much of my son's diet is needed to prevent a recurrence -- which the doc says is quite likely once a person has had kidney stones once, so since One Person is as important as All in this Family, we are all going to work on making a few changes...
I am not going to give you hours of details of the things I learned about kidney stones except to say the DIET part means Less Meat, Less Salt, Less Tea or Coffee, Less Saturated Fats, Less Sugar -- Sort of sounds like the kind of DIET that is and has been touted by doctors and dietitians of what everyone should be eating...
My first step though in Dietary Changes has to be finding ways to reduce Meat. The men in this house eat meat practically for every meal -- so finding alternatives is fairly tricky... Beans seems to be the main alternative.
So the day after the big EMERGENCY, I thought I would head on over to some of the local 2nd hand stores to see if I could find some recipe books to give me some insight into cooking with beans...
I found a few good deals with a stack of Taste of Home magazines for Light Cooking, each one 25 cents, and a Company's Coming Low Fat Cooking by Jean Pare`. I took some time digging through a few of the recipes that I had collected in various note books of my own or cut out of the newspaper...
The really difficult part of a change in Diet is that as of now, the Kidney stones have passed out of his system and with no pain now, the inclination to change is somewhat lost and fading fast...
I am thinking that this really is one of the important parts of being THE MOM in a family, to keep the change that is necessary ON TRACK!
Yeah, they are grown-ups and can think for themselves but (and I guess I cannot say it out loud with 'the men' present) they expect the MOM to take care of stuff like this. I sure don't see my son checking out recipes and looking up the whats or the wherefores of this event...
This Friday really is about huge changes in Food! If you have ideas or experience, leave me a comment! I can use every bit of info that comes my way....
