Sometimes People Ask Me What It Is Like To Be A Lawyer

It is pretty much like this:

TMI (with X-Rays!)

Like some sort of renal al-Qaeda, these kidney stones have been hiding, sleeper cell style, planning for their horrible strike and now they are on the move.

This image of the inside of my abdomen shows that there may be as many as four of the little calciferous terrorists hiding in my urinary tract. They are the little round spots visible beneath and to the sides of my tailbone.

Kidney Stone Alert Level is now at SEVERE.

My Postapocalyptic Kidneys

These two, shrunk down to the size of a pea, more or less, are even now thrashing and smashing their way through the tiny tubules of my left kidney trying to find their way out via the bladder and then, eventually, the urethra.

The assholes.

There is nothing that can be done, really. Just try to ignore them with pain meds, if I can get them.

Doctors are annoyingly difficult about this, even when you calmly explain to them about the Road Warrior themed professional wrestlers that were shrunk down and placed in your kidneys. Even when you demonstrate that you pee only blood.

You'd think that a person with angry shrunken wrestlers kitted out with spiked football pads fucking around in their internal organs could get a little help.

Besides. I'd be a piss poor drug addict if I only needed thirty percocets every ten months or so, right?

Eventually, the angry little cunts will escape from my urinary tract and I'll be free of them for a year or so.

While thrashing in slow motion and moaning into the bathroom floor tiles at four in the morning, this is little comfort.

Paddle to the Plastic Straining Device

When I was a child, my mother used to read this rather sad little book to me called Paddle to the Sea.

It was about a little wooden carving of a Native American in a canoe that was set into a river somewhere in the upper Midwest or Canada or somewhere. You see, carved on the bottom of the canoe was a message entreating anyone who found the little man to place him back in the water so that he could find his way to the sea.

Through a series of misadventures (getting stuck in beaver dams or picked up by children - that sort of thing) his journey is thwarted and then continued anew as people eventually set him on his way again. Eventually he gets to the Atlantic Ocean, where, one can only imagine, he was eaten by a shark.

Anyway, this is a good deal like the journey of my kidney stone.

I've not heard from the spikey bastard in a couple of weeks. It has been paddling around in my bladder, I suppose. In any case, someone has read the inscription carved on its horrible underbelly and returned it to its purpose.

So now it seems to be on the move again, this time out the only way available to it and through the last, most awkward to describe leg of its journey.
Suffice to tell you that it hurts, but not so much as when it is in the kidney, knocking about and making one long for a nuclear missile to swallow. You feel that you have to pee a lot and then you don't pee. It is like a bumblebee is stuck in your urethra and is trying desperately to find its way out, blindly.
Oh yeah, and the bumblebee is wearing those football pads with the spikes - like in The Road Warrior.

Back on the meds.

When I catch the little fucker maybe I'll post a picture. Wouldn't that be terrible?

Kidney Stone Again

Spent Saturday night writhing on the floor (and other surfaces) of the emergency room in high comic style - clawing at the walls, mewling and moaning, tearing at my hair, and just generally making a spectacle of myself.

It was like nothing so much as a community theatre presentation of Altered States, and I was William Hurt in the big climax!

At one point I wept openly in front of a doctor and two nurses.

After being loaded up with Morphine and Tramadol, I was able to stop thrashing enough to speak in complete sentences and eventually I was sent home where I vomited for the fifth (a personal record) time that day.

Chiara was really great and didn't complain about sitting by me in the hospital room even once in all those hours. At one point I encouraged her to explore the building and report back to me if she found the morgue. She resisted even this seemingly irresistible opportunity so as not to miss a minute of my swearing, gnashing, clutching, wheezing, weeping, torsional performance as Jeff, Amateur Werewolf.

I'd like to think I did her proud, especially when, in my incessant and agonized contortions, I nearly twisted the hospital gown right off of me whilst the vaguely granola nurse took my blood pressure. Chiara did her best to keep the garment covering what all (her included) would rather not see.

If I had been a sentient creature at the time, I would have thanked her.

That night, at three thirty in the morning, when we finally crawled into bed, me in a percocet haze and still raw with pain and her bleary eyed and sore from a day working and then tending to her Gollum-like husband, I slept rather well.

She, on the other hand, had nightmare after nightmare. In the morning, she wouldn't tell me about those nightmares, but I knew what they were: dreams of unspeakable things - things like the brief glimpse of lint revealed in my navel as I arched on a hospital bed. Things like the sound made by a thirty year old man when he hiccups at the same time that he sobs and grunts in agony.

But then, these are the things every girl dreams of in a husband.

You're welcome, Chiara.

Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch'Intrate

A number of people have asked me what it was like, studying for the bar. At best I can give a sort of half-answer, since I only sort of half studied. I usually offer some trite, unthinking response.

“It sucked,” I’ll say, or “It’s hell. I hated it.”

And mostly this is the answer they expect and so they are content. But I think a more vivid analogy could be nice:

Studying for the bar exam is just like having anvils dropped on your genitals.

And then those anvils ask you to recite the exclusions to the hearsay rule and the various means by which an executory interest can run afoul of the rule against perpetuities.