Sick Roommate

About a week ago, my roommate was hospitalised for kidney failure.

Inside the past three months, my Uncle Steve passed from liver and kidney failure and my family's cat Luna also passed due to liver and kidney failure, so when I received the news about my roommate, I was feeling very pessimistic. He called me from the hospital while I was still working a direct support shift, and I made the inadvisable decision to answer my phone. Finishing that shift without letting on to how I was feeling was challenging.

I visited him the next day in the hospital, and I gained a better understanding of his condition. His prostate had become inflamed and had been blocking his kidneys, which is something that can happen to people over 40. He didn't get checked, got unlucky, toughed out a bunch of symptoms, had some kind of attack at work, and made it to the hospital right before it would have been too late for him.

The good news is that, it's not his kidneys that are the problem, it's his prostate. His enlarged prostate stopped his kidneys from doing their job, and kidneys that can't do their job will eventually fail. As soon as he got a catheter in, his kidneys were able to do their job again, and the recovery process began.

So now he's waiting for his kidneys to be 100% again so he can have a surgery on his prostate. Things seem optimistic though.

I feel bad, because he had a ton of symptoms for like, three quarters of a year, and I kept telling him to go to the doctor, but I never got on his case about it. Somehow, despite chronic, excruciating back pain, excessive need to use the restroom, the loss of his sense of taste, and his tongue turning white, never caused me to think that anything serious was wrong.

I'm still signed up with my family doctor in Guelph, who I haven't seen for about eight years. I'm finally seeing the need to get someone more local.

In other news, I have updated my gallery blog, and I have added commentary to the two posts I made before today:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6039356006030778391#allposts