freeform goodness

I’ll be uncharacteristically concise and economical with my words because this sitting in a chair thing isn’t really working out all that well for me yet.

Saturday morning, I had my morning coffee and sat down to play a little WoW. I had a few things to take care of, but largely I’d planned a pretty relaxing day. It was not to be. A little after 9AM, I felt a very sharp, very noticble pain in the upper right (from my POV) part of my abdomen. It felt like a particularly nasty gas cramp at first, so I popped a couple of simethicone caplets and sat back down again. They didn’t help. As a matter of fact, the pain quickly ratcheted up, followed by a sudden, intense burst of nausea. Another burst of nausea followed and I, er, returned my morning coffee to the sea. Did I have food poisoning? Bad cream in the coffee? Another burst of nausea and things were getting decidedly unpleasant — since there was nothing in my stomach at all by this point, the only thing coming up was pain. Really, really intense pain. Worse than any pain I’d ever felt before-type pain.

Uh oh.

At this point, I decided I was going to have to visit an urgent-care facility. Tammie and I jumped in the car and midway through the trip I decided that I’d better go straight on to the emergency room — I was feeling that bad. I got into the ER triage area and immediately began grossing out everyone within range by vomiting (nothing) forcefully and loudly into an emesis basin. By this point I was drenched in sweat and pretty much unable to stand unassisted. They quickly (thank you, streamlined admissions process!!!) got me processed and into an ER bed.

The staff in the ER were a well-oiled machine, I’m happy to say. They quickly got an IV started, and got me drugs for pain and nausea. The ER attending physician checked me out (checking the tenderness of the various parts of my abdomen) and fairly quickly surmised that the most likely cause of what was going on was that I had gallstones. To make a long story short, they checked me in, conducted an ultrasound examination to confirm the diagnosis, then sent me upstairs.

You, my lucky reader, get to skip the unfathomable boredom and clasutrophobia associated with being confined to a bed in a small room with IVs poking out of your hands. Shortly after being sent upstairs, I was seen by a surgeon who laid out my options — basically, take the darned thing out. Originally the plan was for me to have the surgery on Sunday morning, but it was simply not to be… as this was a US holiday weekend, the hospital was a bit shortstaffed and was only running a single operating (surgical) room, which means I basically spent a full extra day (Sunday) laying in a hospital bed, going quite literally out of my mind (more than once I had to get myself up and walk around the 8th floor, because being so cooped up was making me nervous and short of breath.)

The ordeal was made quite a bit more bearable by all of the good-humored relatives who stopped by to cheer me up. Tons of love goes to my godparents, Aunt Frances and Uncle John, Aunt Clara, Karl, Kathy, Eric, Jessica, Sean, and especially Kelly, who made a special effort to come by bearing news from my sister, who was over three hours away in Ohio. Karen did make the drive, as did my parents, who drove all the way up from Florida(!)

Back to the medical end of things, the nurses woke me this morning and started getting me ready. They let my visitors go down to the pre-op area with me, asked me lots of questions, poked and prodded me with various expensive beeping things, and eventually eased me off into complete and utter oblivion with some frankly amazing chemical(s). I kinda remember… well, I don’t remember anything except being wheeled into a cold room. and waking up with a set of four, small, stinging holes in my abdomen. Really, two hours disappeared with a finality I didn’t even think possible.

Anyway, I’m back at home now (yep, the very same day, hurray for laproscopy!), with some fascinating aches and some quality pharmaceuticals. And yeah, sitting here kinda hurts, so I’ll talk to y’all later…

:: Dave Walker 19:35 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal]
:: tags: personal

:: Comments (1)

Comments: