My Health

Here I am sick again.  Another bout with a bowel obstruction.  Makes me sad.  This time I was blessed not to have surgery, but I was in hospital for three days with an NG tube down my throat into my stomach.  No food or water for those three days either.  Just Potassium Chloride, straight Potassium and two different antibiotics all being pumped into me rapidly.  I was dehydrated within just a few hours after the attack started.  Tony was with me every minute of the day except at night while I was sleeping.  I am so grateful for that - it was really hard to be in hospital this time.  I was given so much morphine and it didn't even touch the pain!  And what did I get in return?   A freaking major headache! Then the nurse wants me to take Tylenol and puts it in gelatin and tells me to eat it - gelatin melts, but the dry crushed Tylenol sticks to the NG tube and rubs against the side of my throat - ack - such pain!

Plus I'm not allowed to sip water to get the offending junk down!  Oy!  I choke and choke till I almost die!!  So if you think I look bad in the picture, you're right.

On Thursday night when I went to the ER I thought the pain from the strangulated bowel was horrible, but then after having two injections of Morphine I sat bolt upright on the gurney because the pain had moved to my chest and back and was so excruciating that I couldn't breathe.  I felt as though I was going die, I couldn't scream or cry because the pain was so bad.  The nurses performed two EKGs on me, which showed I wasn't having a heart attack, however my blood pressure was sky high and remained so until the pain subsided.  This was when the ER nurse/practitioner told the nurses to prep me for major surgery and called the surgeon.  But when the surgeon came he said no to any surgery until he ran some tests.  First a CAT scan was performed, which confirmed the bowel was strangulated.  The pain was still horrible as I was taken to radiology to get a complete set of X-rays with dye of my entire digestive system.  When the radiology tech rolled my gurney down the hallway to get the X-rays he left me alone in the hallway where i writhed in pain and was moaning, hospital personnel just kept passing me by, not even looking at me,  not even asking me why I was lying there all alone. A very unpleasant experience while suffering the tortures of the damned!  And scared to death.  Then finally, after a long time the technician came for me.

After the tests were over the surgeon told me he wasn't going to perform surgery because he was concerned after seeing my test results.  He said my insides are complicated and that even though this will happen again that it is best for now to just take one day at a time.  So I am.

What does that mean?  I just go on with my life as usual and wait for the next attack.  Limbo...