It's all in the details

6/17

Had to laugh. Today my father was doing a 24 hour urine collection. It is an important test because it will let us know how his kidneys are doing, if he is making the progress he needs to make to move away from dialysis. Today being Sunday, he carted a large blue cooler to family volleyball at the ditch, desert at Aunt Barbara's house, and to dinner at Paula and Bill's. My cousin Amy inquired about the amount of urine he is producing and immediately started converting the 1200 mL to cups (her calculations were surely off in that she came up with approximately 24 cups. I think she mistook mL for teaspoons but am not quite sure). Her 9 year old daughter, always observant and listening in, quietly inquired if he was peeing directly into the cooler. Her misunderstanding was immediately corrected and shared around as a humorous anecdote. A few laughs but the greatest laughter of all came when Jeremy, my 26 year old step-brother, admitted that he too thought my dad was peeing directly into the cooler (rather than the containers iced within). I cracked up, thinking about how surely Jeremy was determined not to use that cooler for anything else ever again and was surprising comfortable sharing the backseat with the cooler with sloshing urine thought to be contained within all day long. Sometimes its the details that help us survive these tough times...