Life can be Normal

And the following years were good. Active family life centered around two great young boys. I was helping coach soccer, football and baseball teams. They both were singers so there were rehearsals and performances. Susan did graduate studies and became the first in the family to get an advanced degree. Vacations took us camping in the Rockies from the desert Southwest north to Canada. Rocky Mountain National Park became a second home. Taking the boys on an overnight hike over the Continental Divide was a spectacular highlight. It was mighty struggle getting up and over the 13,000+ mountains, but a triumphal march back into civilization. Our other destination was Manhattan where my parents had moved into a nice apartment on the Upper West Side, just across from Lincoln Center. The Big Apple became another home away from home. I did return from one vacaction to find an unexpected career change was at hand, but by the end of the summer I had a better job, so basically it just was a summer off! 

At this point PKD was an vague afterthought.  My health was great. Blood Pressure was normal. Well, I was a little overweight, but so what. And then in the mid 90's we decided to take a trip to New York. The church choir was to perform in a choral festival at Lincoln Center. Michael was a huge Civil War buff at the time so we decided to visit battlefields along the drive. The first night we drove through harrowing misty fog to stay close to Shiloh, The next morning, the visit to the battlefield was just what we had hoped it would be. As we drove on, I noticed an oily mist on the rear window. We weren't losing oil, but it was worrisome. I remember feeling nervous, antsy and edgy. It was not proving to be a relaxing trip.


Camping that night at the Cumberland Gap I stepped into a culvert and badly scraped my shin. The next morning, against my violent protests, Susan insisted we go to the emergency room in the nearest town. Leaving Susan and the boys asleep in the car, I went into the clinic where they were really not concerned with my shin, but were extremely concerned with my blood pressure which was 225/180. I had no idea of the severity of the situation. No doubt my anger was pushing it up even higher as they hooked me up to IV's and machines and worked to get things under control. Several hours later Susan came wandering in to see what's up. Thank goodness she had the sense to understand the nature of the emergency. Finally, the pressure came down enough that they would let us leave with prescriptions for medication and the understanding that we needed a cuff to monitor the blood pressure frequently and head for the nearest emergency room if the numbers got too high.

Though we didn't connect the dots at the time, PKD had struck its first blow.

Discovery

In December of 1989 I woke up to severe pain in my right side. It felt like kink and I could stretch in just the right way it would clear up and I could take the boys to school and go to work like a normal day. Instead it just got worse and Susan insisted on calling the doctor who said to just go straight to the emergency room. It seemed silly to me, but the pain was getting worse. After dies and scans I was diagnosed with a kidney stones and after many IV bags and a many clicks of the morphine button, I gave birth to a pair of spiny stones.

But the weird thing I noticed through the haze of the painkillers was the procession of specialists coming in to see the condition revealed by the scanner photos with their paragraphs and  arrows on each one telling all about them. And I remember Dr. Rinner sitting on the window sill telling me that I had an incurable disease that would likely cause no more difficulty than possibly difficulty obtaining insurance. And that was my introduction to Polycystic Kidney Disease.

I did a modicum of research and the odds were slightly in my favor of it never causing problem. It was genetic, but there was no history in the family of kidney disease. It was Christmas. When I was released I helped distribute my company's Christmas cakes and went to Christmas Eve dinner at my sister's house. Like nothing had happened.

And life went back to normal. Except I sure was pissed at how much those specialists charged to come in and see my X-rays. It seemed like I should be charging them!