Two Peas in a Pod

   At 10 PM on Tuesday night this week I felt a little twinge in my lower back. I told Hatch maybe I pulled a muscle on that last walk we took today. But after I went to bed the pain in my “pulled muscle” escalated. By midnight the pain was out of control, so I went upstairs to the guest room to keep from disturbing the house but after several hours of intense pain, I did what every red blooded American man does, I woke up my girl and asked for her medical advice. 
Wives know stuff. 
    Me and Hatch woke up Ms Rachel out of a dead sleep at 3:30 AM and told her what was going on, and in two minutes she said, “you have another kidney stone”. It took me a couple of days to get a CT Scan and then an appointment with my doctor for the diagnosis and a then plan of action. 

   Dr Rachel was right, as she usually is, for the CT Scan showed that I have an 8mm stone lodged in a precarious spot. 

     I had two of these stones in 2021 that were about the same size, between 8 and 9 millimeters in diameter. I don’t have a good grip on the metric system because I’ve been resisting that ‘work of darkness’ since I was a child and President Jimmy Carter tried to force it on us in the 1970’s. What’s a peanut farmer know about measuring systems anyway. As a country we defied James Earl Carter and told him to mind his own business. We may have won that battle but I still can’t use the Metric System. I don’t get the the whole ‘divisible by 10’s madness’.

Hatch thinks I need to learn the metric system but he’s young and smart while I’m an old dog set in my ways. So I did a little research on the BRAVE SEARCH ENGINE App.
       (Sorry, DuckDuckGo)

How big is 8 millimeters? is the question I asked! According to Brave it’s  about the size of a pea in a pod.

 It’s a coincidence that I’m talking about kidney stones and using the word PEA in a non-medical way. Hatch thought that was clever. 

    Out in the country we used to pick field peas in a pod, shell them and make them for dinner. As you may know, those pods have between 5 and 9 peas inside. That’s where the phrase “two peas in a pod” came from. Which means those two things are very much alike.

    So, the kidney stone that I have trapped in me is 8 mm in diameter which is about the size of a pea in a pod. I understood right away how big that stone is. This is the third kidney stone that I have had that size. It’s is painful. To give you an idea of the size stone moving through my system it would be like 
rolling a bowling ball through a plastic straw. But you couldn’t do that in California because they’ve outlawed plastic straws and bowling. They say those things contributes to climate change or is decimating the unicorn population. I’m not sure which. 

But the point here is this. I have a kidney stone the size of pea, lodged in my plumbing. It may be two weeks before I can get an appointment to have it removed. 

It’s a good thing that Congress fixed health care last week. 
Thanks for nothing Joe Manchin. You remind me of another southerner from the 1970’s.

Two peas in a pod. A pain in the…