Hi wonderful readers.  I’ve been neglecting my Christian posts of late but I’ll tell you of the odd happenings and other reasons why (besides my previous post regarding CafePress).

First, let me mention what has been unfortunately happening with my husband.  My hubby has been ill all his life, and was finally diagnosed a while back with moderately-severe ulcerative colitis, an auto-immune disease.  They try to keep it under control with a drug that is for milder cases, and it doesn’t really make him disease-free.  So he has had those issues, but, something new came up.  He passed out just before work one day – prior to that he was very fatigued and had other symptoms for some time, too, but he kept working (it’s hard to tell if some symptoms are from UC or from something else).

That was about four weeks ago and the doctors still don’t know what is wrong with him.

They had done an MRI of his head and found that he has a large group of brain cysts that are very odd.  They said at Kaiser that they had never seen anything like it (perhaps that’s because they don’t do as many tests on people as they should – seriously), but that those cysts would not be causing his symptoms.  So they apparently will be testing him more to try and figure out what is going on (this had been a slow and agonizing process with Kaiser – another healthcare provider is recommended).

In the meantime, if you can believe this, he developed extreme pain where a kidney is and he went to the ER.  They assumed the basic and normal thing – first time kidney stone victim.  But, as he needed more pain medication than normal and his heart rate was elevated for a very long time, he was admitted to the hospital.  I could write a whole long essay about his incident relative to our insurance, but right now I’ll ignore that.  In the end, what they found was that he had a large “kidney stone” that isn’t a “stone” blocking the tube from kidney to bladder.  He has stabilized but we’re waiting for the thing to come out to determine what it is, since it’s not made of calcium.

Otherwise, as we simply need more income, I’ve been trying to garner more freelance work and have been checking out the possibility of  another part-time job (haven’t looked into temp agencies yet, but if you have opinions of any agencies I’d be interested to hear of your experiences).  I’ve had two* assignments published at Yahoo! and am waiting–for what seems like an eternity, they are so slow–for other submissions to be accepted or rejected.  So, the time I used to spend writing posts here, I’ve been investigating where I might publish, obtaining writing gigs, and writing articles/essays.  One of my poems, one that is posted at this blog, is to be included in a Korean anthology of Christian poems.

I haven’t forgotten about this blog, however–no way.  I had studied much for writing a nice post on the book of Jonah and how it relates to Christ and God’s plan for mankind, but got distracted and overly annoyed about an explanation I saw by Calvin regarding why/why not God “changed his mind” about destroying Nineveh.  I thought it so absurd that I was preparing to write an essay about that only, but, I stopped myself (rage posts aren’t a good idea).  I then lost interest in writing up the Jonah piece, but I do plan on getting that done sometime soon.  It is one of my favorite prophetic sections in the Bible.

* I posted about my first one involving appendicitis, and if anyone is interested in my second one on preventing strokes, well, I’d be happy to know that you enjoyed it!

Update (May 18, 2014):  My husband became extremely pained again and we went to urgent care.  While kidney stones indeed cause a level of pain that is compared the child-birth, we just weren’t sure what to do.  What is “normal” when dealing with kidney stones?  Should you have to miss one to six weeks of work because of constant excruciating pain and/or nausea?  We now know that a big part of my husbands health problems are related to becoming dehydrated, which is being caused by his ulcerative colitis.  This was causing more problems with his kidney/kidney stones.

But to get to the point, he had surgery to remove the stone, which was found to be lodged in his ureter somehow.  I wish I knew more – I was at the pharmacy when my husband woke up and the nurses told him about the unwelcome lodger.  Regarding the weird non-calcification issue, the surgeon did speak to me briefly and said that the stone WAS calcified, so it is currently a mystery to us why were told differently earlier.  Thanks for reading and any prayers; if you have questions, feel free to ask!  We don’t mind, and maybe we’ll learn more from the question and in the effort to answer.