Month: June 2025

Another scariest day of my life

On By Michel McDonaldIn HealthLeave a comment

I wrote a health blog post in October 2021 called the scariest day of my life. That day I woke up and went to the bathroom, as you do, but I was having issues urinating. I stood up and looked in the toilet and it was nothing but blood. I went to the ER and they did a CT scan and told me it’s possible I have bladder cancer. They didn’t know why I was urinating blood. I was told to see my regular doctor and a urologist. My doctor gave the referral and I saw a urologist who said I had an enlarged prostate. He gave me Flomax and suddenly I was able to urinate easier, and he ran a camera into my bladder and I could see the inside of my bladder and it didn’t look like there were any issues. They didn’t know why that happened to me.

This week on Wednesday June 18th, 2025 I woke up and everything was normal, but then later in the afternoon I went to the bathroom and I was standing up, but I wasn’t looking in the toilet. I went to flush and saw all of the water was red. I tried going again later, but it was difficult to get anything out, but there was some blood dripping out. The doctor called and told me it sounds like I’m passing a kidney stone. They told me I had stones at one point, so I guess they assumed that’s what was happening. She told me to go to the emergency room immediately, and so I did.

We went to the emergency room at around 6:30pm and they asked for a urine sample. I went to the bathroom and it was a struggle, but I managed to fill the cup with blood. It was so dark that it looked more like a paint sample.

They brought me to a room to find out why I was there, then they did a CT scan, and then they took blood and after several hours they brought me back there to the desk where they look at your insurance information and wait for the doctor. There weren’t any beds, so I saw the doctor while sitting in the chair and he told me there were blood clots in my bladder, so no stones. I told him I couldn’t urinate easily, because pissing out blood clots hurts like hell, so he said we can irrigate your bladder, and so they did that.

Finally around 11:30pm they brought me to one of the beds and told me to remove all of my clothes and put the gown on and they set me up on the bed to get ready for hell lol. It was not pleasant at all. They had to insert a catheter and oh my freaking God, that was so painful. At first he started putting it in, but then took it out because he said it was too big, so then he put a smaller one in there. Holy fucking Shit! That fucking hurt going in, but once it was in, I was fine. They had 2 huge bags of what I can only assume was gallons of saline water. It wasn’t the normal IV bag you see, these bags were huge. You see the tube of saline going in and then there was another tube with blood going out. That took about 2 hours. Then he took the catheter out and it still hurt for several minutes after he pulled it out.

I was told I had a UTI and that could be the cause. I was told the last time I had a UTI before I urinated blood, but not much was done for me, and then I urinated blood, but this time they gave me an IV with an antibiotic and they prescribed an antibiotic to take twice a day for 7 days.

Ok, so I came home and had the urge to urinate, and not thinking anything would happen, I stood in front of the toilet and let the gates open, and I screamed bloody murder because it felt like my dick was on fire. 3 or 4 blood clots immediately shot out like a rocket and some blood and urine came out and I clenched so fast to stop the flow and that hurt too, but even more.

The guy who inserted the catheter told me I will be in pain for the next 4 days, but I didn’t understand until I came home and went to urinate like nothing had just happened. The next day was hell every time I had to urinate, then the next day, and today is day 3 and it still stings a little, but it is getting easier. I didn’t realize this would be the result of having a catheter. Even though I hate that I’m going through this now, I don’t regret having them irrigate my bladder because I would’ve had to suffer from pushing out all of the blood clots on my own at home like the last time.

I am seeing my doctor on Monday morning and then she’ll put in a referral for the urologist and they’ll probably go in with a camera again like the last time to see what is going on. Was it just a result of a UTI that I had no idea I had, or is it something worse? I was told by the nurse who inserted the catheter that this is typically happening because a patient has bladder cancer, so even though I don’t want to accept that it might be cancer, I’m not ruling anything out. I won’t have a choice but to accept whatever the outcome is when they examine my bladder.

This whole thing really sucks. I don’t know why this is happening. I just turned 55 years old. This getting old bullshit is pissing me off lol. I don’t want to do it anymore. Is there a way I can go backward?

Update: I saw my doctor and she gave me a referral for the urologist who is so busy that I have to wait 4 weeks to see them. My doctor told me that she isn’t convinced I have a UTI. I actually took all of the antibiotics that they gave me and a few days after I finished it all started again. I was urinating blood for another 24 hours. I told my doctor and she said I think you are passing kidney stones. I’m better now, and she told me she tried to reroute my referral to expedite the appointment and the referral department told me to call the urologist and they told me no, they can’t expedite or reroute my appointment. My appointment is still the same and I just have to wait and there’s just no getting around it. So I guess we will see what happens in August.

Sunflower Bouquet Diamond Painting from Make Market

On By Michel McDonaldIn crafts, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I bought these 3 diamond paintings from Michael’s for my birthday. The Sunflower Bouquet diamond painting didn’t include the DMC color numbers in the chart on the sides of the canvas, but the Mushrooms and Rainbow Surfboards diamond painting did include that. Actually, the Mushrooms has it printed on the sides of the canvas, but not the rainbow surfboards because there were no sides because it came with a frame, instead it came with a long piece of paper with the color numbers, codes and DMC numbers.

I went online looking for the DMC color numbers for the Sunflower Bouquet and someone said that Make Market doesn’t include DMC numbers, but as I said, the mushrooms and rainbow surfboards have them included. Perhaps their old diamond paintings didn’t include them, but they are included now, or maybe vice versa. Who knows.

I contacted Michael’s a few days ago and they finally responded this morning with the chart, so I took a screenshot and here it is if you are looking for it.

I actually bought this ARTDOT color card for diamond paintings from Amazon and I held all of the diamond drills up to the diamond drills that are glued to the chart, and I was correct with all but 3. I was quite surprised how accurate it was when Michael’s sent me that email this morning and I went over the numbers I typed out and saw I was correct, besides the 3 that I got wrong.

I will benefit from this chart when I have diamond drills that fell out of the container and onto my desk, or when they fall onto the floor and don’t know where they go. Also, I have extra diamond drills from past diamond paintings that don’t actually match the other ones I have from other diamond paintings with the same DMC numbers. So this will help me determine the correct DMC numbers so I can relabel the containers. I believe there are 4 colors where I have 2 containers with the same number, but the colors are not the same shade. These came from either Amazon or Temu.

So I finished the Rainbow Surfboards diamond painting, and here it is on my bedroom wall with the frame. I actually love this frame and would like to buy more frames for the other diamond paintings that I have, rather than having them framed, which can become quite expensive.

I think these are an excellent way to decorate your walls. I don’t have much on my walls, so these diamond paintings will be very nice to look at.

I finished making this “Sunflower Bouquet” Diamond painting by Make Market from Michaels. It took me almost 3 weeks to make starting on June 19, 2025 and finishing on July 8, 2025. I took 2 pictures, one on my bed last night in very poor lighting with a flash, then again this morning on the sidewalk in the sun. I am very happy with this and I can’t wait to see it hanging in my bedroom. I bought a wooden magnetic frame on Amazon which will be here next week on July 16.

This is the picture I took in the sun.
This is the image in poor lighting with the flash in my bedroom.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum

On By Michel McDonaldIn BooksLeave a comment

Let me just start off by saying I am 55 years old. I have never read The Wizard of Oz books in my whole life. As a child, I struggled with reading because I have dyslexia and I have a learning disability and later in life I discovered that I have attention deficit disorder. So I have many factors working against me when it comes to reading books. So this was never on the reading list for me as a child or teenager or any age. It was this year in 2025 that I made a New Year’s resolution to start reading The Wizard of Oz books, and today I’ve finally finished reading them.

There are 14 books in this collection, and many years ago when I first got my Kindle I had bought all 14 books in one single Kindle ebook. Since I’m doing the reading challenge with Goodreads, I decided that instead of reading the one with all of the books included, that I would buy every book on my Kindle because if I just read the one book, then it would count as one book instead of 14, so I bought all 14 books. Thank goodness it wasn’t that costly because most of them were a dollar, but some of them were free because they are in the public domain.

I was a bit surprised to read so many different characters that I’d never heard about in the original movie based on the first book. But of course they only did a movie based on one book. In the 1980s they had a movie called Return to Oz and that story included the second and third books combined. They altered the story a bit, but that’s pretty much what Hollywood does anyway. But in return to Oz they introduced some characters that nobody has ever heard of, so when I saw that movie many years ago, I didn’t realize that those were actual characters from the books. I thought it was just Hollywood being creative. It wasn’t until I actually started reading the books that I realized those are actual characters that L. Frank Baum wrote about. Silly me.

We just recently had a movie come out called Wicked based on the wicked witch and Glinda the good witch, which is based on a play. Look, I don’t know much about this because I’ve never seen the play and I still have yet to see Wicked, but when it’s on digital I will watch it. But I wanted to read the books before I saw Wicked because I want to get to know the world of Oz before I watch any more about it. It is interesting that the movie and play Wicked is based on Glinda meeting the wicked witch for the first time and what, they’re going to college? I’m a little confused, but I will be up to date I’m sure when I see the movie lol.

All I’m going to say is that if you have not read these books yet, read them because these books have added more to the magical wonderful world of Oz to my brain than I could have ever imagined. It’s an interesting story and it’s an interesting world and all of the characters are very, I hate to be redundant, but I’m just going to say interesting again.

Now that I have finally fulfilled my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to go back to reading all the other stuff that I like to read with vampires and other supernatural things LOL.