Happy New Year! It took five days to pass the kidney stone, two trips to the ER, two Spiral CT scans, and some heavy-duty painkillers. I paced the floor of my house for four hours one night figuring that the pain had to let up sooner or later but it didn’t. Woke up my wife at 3:45am to take me back to the hospital.
This was my fifth stone since 1996. I am supposed to be drinking a lot of water and lemon juice(the citrate in the lemon juice is supposed to bind with the oxalates that make stones and prevent them from forming. You can’t have the rind or the pulp; they contain oxalates; just the juice), but I haven’t been doing it like I should. The guy who services my air conditioner says that I should change the filter more often too. Yet more lessons on what happens if you don’t pay attention to detail and adopt an attitude of neglect.
In the Keeper’s day neglect was something that could never happen. Ships traveling in the shipping lanes offshore depended on the light to fix their position along the coast as they sailed north and south. It is still true today. In spite of all the modern instruments aboard ocean going vessels, we are still human beings and captains like to use their eyes. It is a great comfort to them to look across the vast blackness of the ocean and see a signal light telling them the same thing their instruments do. That is why we like to continue to be operational as a private aid to navigation for the Coast Guard.
I guess if I paid as much attention to taking care of my kidneys as I do our lighthouse, I wouldn’t have started my new year run aground on a rock…(yea, I know it’s a bad joke, but I couldn’t pass it up).
