Road Trip, Boot Camp, Kidney Stones and More

Bootcamp

My son Robert and I went to Tennessee for Western Warrior Boot Camp 2019.  It was a non-stop event — 10 am to 3 pm Saturday and Sunday.  There was so much action that I didn’t stop to take any pictures.  Here’s a shot of the group.  The instructors were Mark Hatmaker (back row, fourth from left), John Miller (back row, fifth from left) and Jim Marx (second row, kneeling far left with epic beard).

Robert and I are the two goons in matching black Cabal Fang t-shirts on the far right

Hatmaker is the author of several dozen martial arts videos and books, and is a walking encyclopedia of wrestling holds.  Coach Marx is a combatives and LEO/police/military instructor with a Pentagon pedigree.  And John Miller trained under Carlos Cummings and  Vladislav Koulikov (a fight coordinator and actor in John Wick).  These instructors are some of the baddest dudes on the planet.  It was a privilege to train with them.

Road Trip

The trip down to TN was fun.  Slideshow of the pics below.  The two nicest places we went to eat were Little Dutch Restaurant and 60 Beans Coffee & Crepes.  I’m not the guy who takes pictures of food, but that peanut butter, banana and Nutella crepe from 60 Beans was too pretty and too tasty not to photograph.

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Kidney Stone

On Saturday afternoon my back started killing me.  I figured it was just all of the martial arts action catching up with me.  Got up Sunday morning and it was a little better.  I was able to train and wasn’t too bad, but I still wasn’t quite myself.  Drove home okay, although it was still mighty sore.

Woke up Monday morning and I felt great.  But as I was pouring my morning coffee it felt like a baseball bat hit me in my side.  Then the pain radiated downward, and it was like getting kicked straight up the middle, over and over, without letting up.  Hands down, it was the worst pain ever.

My beautiful wife Karen took me to the ER and it was a kidney stone.  Luckily there was a cancellation and I was able to get lithotripsy done by noon — that’s where they blast up the stones with sound waves — specifically extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT) which is just a fancy way of saying they do it from the outside of the body.  No incisions, no scopes, just punching you in the kidney with this fancy machine.

I spent yesterday urinating sand.  Yay.  This morning I’m headed back to work.

I have to take a week off of strenuous activity.  In a couple of weeks I go back for a followup to make sure all the fragments passed.  And they’ll test the fragments to determine what kind of stones I had and how to prevent them.

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