Poor Dad

Dave is in process of passing another kidney stone. Yesterday morning, at about 11:00, after I had finished teaching my class. I got a call from Dave. Thank goodness we decided to buy a cell phone! He was out at the west campus, and had finished teaching his first class.He had a two hour break from noon to 2:00 PM. He asked how my class had gone, and then told me that he was in pain, and was having a kidney stone attack. He didn't have any pain medicine with him either. So I hopped on the next bus out to the west campus to take some drugs to him.

I had to wait 45 minutes for the bus, and the bus ride took another 45 minutes (thank goodness that it wasn't rush hour or it would have taken double the time to get there!). So he was in some pretty severe pain for a couple of hours before I got there with the pain killers. I brought him some of my strongest head-ache medicine (two tramadols), two extra strength tylenol, three aspirin, and three ibuprofen. I called it my super-duper pain-killer cocktail. I also brought some food, so that the meds wouldn't be so hard on his stomach. He ate a banana and a couple cookies, took the medicine and it was amazing how fast he started feeling better.

While Dave was waiting for me to get there, he found a teacher's lounge with a couch to lay down on. This might seem like a pretty good place, but it was stifling hot. There was no air conditioning, and no ventilation. So he went outside, and laid down on the grass by the pond. His first kidney stone attack was terrible. And all subsequent attacks have been progressively less severe, except for this one. He said that this was probably almost as bad as the first. Poor guy... My guess is that the worst of his attack had passed by the time I got there, because he recuperated amazingly fast, and was able to teach his 2:00 PM class.

Class periods out on the west campus last an hour an a half. I stayed with him, and helped out a little. At first, I thought that maybe I would be teaching the class myself. It would have been fine for me to do it, as we prepared the lesson plan together, and I've used the same plan in classes that I had already taught. But he came through, and actually did a great job. We got home at about 5:00 PM, and I had a class on the main campus from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. Dave came to my class with me, and helped me set up our projector, lap-top and DVD player. We're so glad that we have each other to help get through it all. It was a long day.