Thought for the Day: While We are Living, We are Always in the Middle of the Story, and We Can't Know What is Good Until the End

Here are some seemingly good things:

• Having the flight attendant tell you minutes before take off that you can move all the way up to the middle of the plane and have a whole row to yourself.
• Your flight arrives 30 minutes early (and you were much closer to the front of the plane), so you can make mincha and not miss a kaddish.
• Having a choice of kosher snacks and beverages on a flight and getting two of the chocolate quinoa ones. (Chocolate makes it delicious and quinoa makes it a healthy snack choice; win-win.)

Here are some seemingly bad things:

• Flight delayed by two hours while sitting on the runway.
• Being suddenly wrenched awake from a deep and peaceful sleep by a blaring horn.
• Having a kidney stone that is in the upper 20th percentile of size and being hospitalized out of town on the day of your return flight.

Let's start with that last one. I don't want to get into that game of "what hurts more, kidney stones or childbirth?" I also want to keep this TftD SFG (suitable for grandsons, who most definitely do not want to talk about their zeidy's plumbing issues.) I will simply note that after such a long, painful event, getting a new human being is a better alternative to a rock. Childbirth is a celebration. Passing a kidney stone is a relief that you wished you had never had to experience in the first place. (Even though our children put us through their teenage years, it is worth it. First: it doesn't kill us, and we do get stronger. Second: we eventually get grandchildren from those very teenagers, which is both a blessing and revenge in one adorable package. What could be better?)

Back to kidney stones. I had never had one before, so I had no idea what was causing my "discomfort" (I love that word...so flexible), which grew to, "It's ... gasp... gasp a 10," in response to "what's your pain level now?"

The hospital was great, and things moved very quickly. (Wall clock time, not perceived time.) The choice was to blast the stone with a laser (laser lithotripsy), leave in a stent to allow healing, which is removed a couple of weeks later. And the doctor didn't know either the operating room or the laser was available. The second option was to just put in a stent and let them take care of everything else in Chicago. With my own doctors. In my own home. Whence I was scheduled to fly that afternoon. I chose #2. A quick 45-minute, barely invasive procedure, released that evening. One more night with the grandchildren. Perfect.

I was greeted by my very worried wife in the recovery room. That 45-minute, simple, barely invasive procedure had morphed into a complex and tricky operation that lasted more than two hours. What happened? The stent is about 2 mm/0.1 inches in diameter. The normal ureter is 2-4 mm; snug but fits easily. As usual, my stuff was not "usual." 😐 The ureter was nearly blocked by scar tissue (more on that in the next paragraph; cliffhanger, no?). She couldn't even get the balloon used to dilate constricted ureters in there. Her only option was the laser—not to blast the stone, but just to do some demolition of the scar tissue to get the stent in. Baruch HaShem, the laser was available. Baruch HaShem, she had skilled hands. And voilà, the second option becomes the only option.

So how did all that scarring occur? The doctor's first thought was radiation. My wife told her that I had only chemo and no radiation. When I woke up, we figured it out. The tumor I had over 30 years ago had encased the ureter. The chemo killed the tumor. The body had to replace the tissue of the ureter from the holes left from the killed tumor. Hence scarring.

That's bad, right? Actually, in retrospect, I am very, very fortunate that a kidney stone formed. If it hadn't, the scarring that had (presumably) been getting progressively worse over the last 30+ years would have filled in the entire ureter. A pipe that is filled with scar tissue is not a pipe; it can easily develop into a life-threatening situation. Moreover, you don't get the intense pain until the end stages, when everything becomes an emergency. The pain from the kidney stone was more like a smoke alarm. It got me to the hospital quickly, and it also indicated exactly where the problem was. It was a little kid yelling that he is scared and pointing to the monster.

Let's look back at the list of bad things. The last we just discussed. The third was also the second. Not an annoying, shrieking horn, but an alarm. The first is what actually enabled those good things on the first list. The flight to Chicago was delayed, so the airline was extra nice about the return flight.

I am not known for my subtlety (I bet you didn't even think I could spell that word! Ha! I used AI.) We are now in Elul and are hearing the call of the shofar to wake us up from the deep and peaceful slumber of our daily routine.

Before you leave, I would like to note something about the first list. You might think those are really minutia compared to the other topics. I would like to suggest that by noting each and every kindness we can actually help arouse ourselves out of that slumber. The nurses in the hospital would ask how I was doing. I answer, "Great! Baruch HaShem/Thank G-d." Some just looked at me. Others actually asked, "Really?" I answered honestly, "Yes. There may be a dozen or so things going very badly right now, but there are 100s of thousands of things going very well also. I don't want to forget those."