Uraling to Boreas Pass, to be known as the Kidney Stone Ride

Thursday, July 18

The day started with a new pain on the left lower side of my back.  After some stretching moves, the pain subsided so I thought no more of it, thinking it was just old age catching up with me.

Martha and I rode over to nearby Breckenridge and I dropped her off to check out the "Troll".  I tanked up in town and then headed out on Boreas Pass Road to check out the scenery. 

Last time I was there, was in search of Fall Colors:  LINK

Boreas Pass is quite rocky in parts, hell, most of it is rocks that were bouncing Scarlett around quite a bit.  ( I think I may need new rear shock absorbers on the tug).

More traffic than I expected for a mid-week ride, but then again it's summer time.

 The view from near town, not too shabby.

I arrived at the usual spot for pictures and the mountains were in full display, the pain had returned but not too bad and it seemed to go away with the walking I did to get the below pictures so again, I just ignored it.

Kept on riding towards the pass summit, made it there but it was crawling with cagers so kept right on going.

At this point the pain returned and got steadily worse. 

I turned around soon and moved rapidly to a shady spot I'd spotted earlier closer to town:

I drank the bottle of water Martha had provided me, did the same stretching exercise as before and it seemed to help a little bit.  Took a while but the pain subsided to the point I could ride again.

I called Martha once I had coverage and told her to prepare to go to the ER!

In pain but still able to ride, I met up with Martha after some tense phone conversations (sorry, dear) and we rode to Dillon's Hospital's Emergency Room.

Got checked, described the symptoms while at time writing in pain and tests were run, including a CAT scan.  My first.

Resulting imagery was transmitted via Internet to Denver for a Urologist's review and apparently a 3 mm wide kidney stone had dislodged from my left kidney and was causing blockages on the tube leading to the bladder....hence the periodic and rather high pain.

Apparently, the kidney is covered in nerve endings in that area, which provide for the high level of pain I'd never experienced before.  Yay, another first. 

I also showed up very dehydrated and with microscopic blood in my urine.  So they push an IV bag's worth of fluid into me and the pain abated.

They offered morphine but I declined, hoping to be able to ride the rig back to the RV.  The fluid from the IV did the trick thankfully to remedy the pain.

Now waiting for the kidney stone to come out, am told more pain in my future but was also prescribed meds to make things flow easier and to manage the pain with Percoset.

Once released from the ER, we rode to pick up the prescriptions from Walmart and then back to the RV.

We broke camp and came home, even though scheduled to spend one more night in the campground; I wanted to be home for part two of the kidney stone's passage.

Got home to a broken Air Conditioner.  Turned out to be the blower motor and it was replaced today, Friday, thanks to a neighbor friend who does such work on the side.  Lucky for us we knew him, because our regular HVAC company couldn't send someone till July 29!