So I went to the main UCLA campus for a couple of kidney ultrasounds today. The appointment was at 2:00 pm. Since it is Friday, I knew traffic would be bad. Still, I spent a total of 4 hours driving today. I left my house at noon-ish, and arrived at UCLA at 1:20 pm. Since I needed to pick up a prescription, that worked out well. The radiology lab was super busy today. With half the seats blocked off due to COVID measures, the waiting room was almost fully occupied. Surprisingly, I did get called at the appointed time, and the ultrasounds took about an hour. The tech was very nice and talkative, so much so that I thought about telling him to pay attention to the procedure. 😀
I paid for parking ($14!) and left UCLA at around 3:00 pm. At first both Tesla navigation and Waze showed a two hour drive back home. As I drove, that slowly grew to two and a half hours. While the Tesla onboard navigation told me to stay on I-405, even though it was basically a parking lot, Waze kept trying to route me off the freeway and onto surface streets, all to save a few minutes. I ignore Waze. With Autopilot in heavy traffic, the Tesla can really drive itself. There are no intersections or pedestrians on the freeway, and it is trivial for the navigation computer to hold the lane and keep distance. IMHO, it is much more work to drive on local streets. I did cheat a bit in Long Beach by driving in a few off-ramps that merged back onto the freeway, along with probably thousands of other drivers. That saved about three minutes according to the nav computer.
One think I did notice though is there are a lot of terrible drivers. Either they are incompetent, or being intentionally dangerous. When Autopilot is engaged in my Tesla, I usually relax more, and get to “spectate” a bit. You really notice how aggressive or entitled some drivers are. I would bet that a lot of the actual traffic slowdowns are caused by inconsiderate drivers forcing others to brake so they can save a few seconds, or jump one space in line. I also saw several cars driving on the shoulders at fairly high speeds while the regular lanes are stopped. Super dangerous.
I guess I am spoiled from not driving to work for the past 15 months. One silver lining of unknown vaccine efficiency for transplant recipients is still having a (good) excuse for avoiding crowds. I will likely not have to go into work until we start having COVID vaccine booster shots.
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Almost forgot. Since the ultrasound took about an hour, the tech turned the computer screen towards me so I could see the actual images and videos. He also explained a few things to me. It was pretty interesting to see the actual kidney and blood/urine flow in/out of it. Too bad I did not take a photo; my phone was stashed on a chair along with the other stuff in my pockets. I also did not realize how big a kidney was. A few people were posting pics of their “new” kidney. Maybe these were deceased donor kidneys? UCLA certainly did not show me my sister’s kidney before they transplanted it in me.
Not sure if that is a real kidney or just a model for a stock photo, but it is pretty large. I have three of them now. Doctors said bad kidneys will atrophy so maybe my two old kidneys are taking up less room.
Life with chronic diseases 