Back from the hospital..yes AGAIN!

I'm sure some of you were wondering what happened to me. What about the interview, my upcoming vacation, etc. Well, nix everything because I ended up in the hospital again. It was the same problem I had a few weeks ago with my stomach; most specifically, my small bowel mesentery . For whatever reason, the mesentery and vascular network is getting inflamed which causes the small bowel to thicken and hurt like you wouldn't believe; I can only compare the cramping to childbirth as the pain builds to an unbearable gut-wrenching pain, radiating throughout your stomach and back and then subsides only to recur a few moments later. I don't even remember the first two days in the hospital because I was so drugged up on pain medication.

I'm still pretty wiped out so I'm going to keep this short (the previous post was written before I got sick). I went into the hospital on Wednesday and just got out yesterday evening. They wanted to keep me through Monday, but they couldn't find anyplace to start a new IV (for some antibiotics they have me on mainly) as I kept blowing them. When this last one blew, I refused to be stuck again as they had literally tried about every vein in both forearms and were discussing putting in a picc line. At the moment, both forearms are swollen, the right more so than the left...I'm a little concerned about it actually as it is a bit inflamed and warm to the touch..I'm guessing it may be cellulitis, but I'll call the doc. I'm on two high powered antibiotics, so that should help.

They basically checked me for any and all diseases that could cause vasculitis, many of which I'd never heard of (Whipple's disease) and some I was familiar with (Lymphoma, Lupus, etc.). Every test they ran came back negative and the small bowel study just told them what they already knew from the CT scan....that the mesentery and small bowel was inflamed. The radiologist that did my small bowel study happened to have just read an article that Lisinopril (my blood pressure med)had been linked to vasculitis so they took me off lisinopril and put me on some other med.

Like last time, I began to get better in the hospital before they really started any treatment other than IV fluids. The pain started to lessen and my white count went back down before they made the decision to try antibiotics, so essentially I was improving on my own which got me thinking. I don't think it was the lisinopril because I continued to take that in the hospital last time and after I was released and I was fine. However, I remembered that I had started the birth control pill my gyno had put me on, Low-ogestrel, about a week before being hospitalized the first time. While I was in the hospital, I didn't take it because I didn't have it with me. When I got out, I had missed so many days, I just decided to wait a few weeks and start the next one when I would have had I continued with the initial pack. I started the new pack almost a week to the day before getting sick again. Both times, I finished about a week's worth of this medication before going into the hospital. I mentioned it to the doctors, but they didn't seem to think it was a likely culprit. Maybe not, but at the moment, it makes the most sense.

They wanted to do a biopsy tomorrow, but honestly, I don't know if that will give them anymore information and I was READY to go home. I figure IF I get sick again, I'll let them do the biopsy at that point. For now, I have discontinued the lisinopril and the low-ogestrel and I'm hoping for the best.

The very big downside to this is that we won't be going to Indiana to visit my family which is a huge disappointment to Tanner and myself. I'm very happy to be feeling better, but we were really looking forward to this trip. I also obviously didn't get to do the interview with Dr. Duperier which was also disappointing, but oh well...maybe some other time.

Just call me "Grace"

Note: I meant to post this Saturday so keep that in mind reading this post.

Well, I seem to be recovering from whatever ailment I had last week. I had a minor setback yesterday at lunch though. I had some buffalo wings left over from a Pizza Hut order the night before and had three at lunch. You know how much meat is on those things (not much). I’m lucky if it was an ounce of chicken between all three, but I honestly think 2 is my absolute limit. I hadn’t had much that morning (just a protein shake, coffee and some crystal light) so I figured I’d throw one more in there to get more protein in. I ate too fast and I think it must have gotten stuck because 10 minutes later I was in the bathroom with the “foamies.”

Basically, the “foamies” are when you get nausea and vomiting, but nothing really comes up…just kind of foamy spit (lovely I know). I had to log out of work a few hours early so that I could lie down. I tried to stick it out, but it soon became apparent that I might actually end up retching while I had a customer on the line which probably wouldn’t have been good for business.

When I woke up later, I was good as new so perhaps my stomach/intestines are still sensitive. They could actually still be a bit swollen which may mean I’m more likely to have things get “stuck.” I’ll just have to be careful and chew really well I suppose.

Prior to the chicken getting stuck, I had another exciting thing happen while trying to give our stubborn black lab his twice a day meds. He has gotten so stubborn that now, even if I manage to hide his pills in a pill pocket, piece of cheese or bread, etc. he will chomp it until it breaks apart and then eat everything BUT the darn pills; this from a dog that we have to keep from eating his own crap. Somehow his own crap is more appetizing than a few teeny tiny pills, go figure.

Lately, I have had to resort to forcing his mouth open, shoving the pill pocket back as far as I can and then closing his mouth and massaging his throat to get him to swallow. Yesterday, he somehow managed to spit it back out and Paxton (our pain in the rear Pomeranian) snatched it up and ran for my bedroom (he has a hoarding problem and keeps all his “treasures” under my bed where nobody can follow him…he needs help). I jumped up out of the chair to run after him and somehow managed to trip over my own feet falling knee first onto our ceramic tiled floor…yeah, felt great!

I must have scared the crap out of Paxton because he spit the pill pocket out and hid under my bed. Poor Thunder came over to check on me while I was trying to get over the worst of the initial pain and stayed with me until I pulled myself up. 5 months ago, there is NO way I could have pulled myself up off the floor UNINJURED and here I was, feeling as if I’d been hit by a semi yet able to get back on my feet without any special assistance. It is nice when you can find the positive in a painful and embarrassing experience isn’t it?

Today, my body literally aches all over. I’m bruised and battered, but doing surprisingly well considering the impact my poor knee experienced yesterday. I can only imagine how bad that fall would have been 5 months ago!

Spent a few days in the hospital again...BOO

Hey all. Sorry for my absence of late, but I have been one sick puppy. I mentioned that I just wasn’t feeling great the last few weeks and the bloodwork I had done may explain some of it. Apparently my thiamine (B1) was low and after looking up the symptoms that can be caused by low thiamine levels, I saw that it explained quite a few of the problems I was having:

"The most common symptoms of thiamine deficiency are irritability, fatigue, poor concentration and memory loss. These are the early thiamine deficiency signs. If the deficiency continues, then peripheral nueropathy can take place due to damage to the peripheral nervous system. The symptoms of this condition are muscle weakness, mainly in the legs, loss of sensation, and tingling or burning sensation in the legs."

I bolded the symptoms I was having in addition to the gastrointestinal problems the article goes on to describe as "other symptoms" of thiamine deficiency. So, I'm going to see about getting some B1 and start taking my supplements the way I should.

I don't know if the thiamine problem led to the problem that ultimately landed me in the hospital this week, but I suppose it could have contributed to it. Sunday night, I was in the ER because I thought I was developing a blood clot in my right calf. It had been tender to the touch and I wasn't sure if it was a clot or low potassium, but I continued to watch for signs of swelling, fever in the area, itching, etc. By Sunday night, my ankle had started to swell and itch and I mentioned it to Erik who freaked out and demanded that I go to the hospital. I tried to talk him out of it because honestly, I figured I would be fine until the next day. I had to work that night for a few hours and I just wasn't up to a trip to the ER. Erik wouldn't hear it though. Ever since my surgery, he's been extremely cautious when it comes to my health which I guess is a good thing. Anyway, he came home from work, we went to the ER where we spent about 4 hours.

They did an ultrasound of my leg, and I actually learned something I didn't know about blood clots...they aren't so concerned about clots in the peripheral or superficial veins (like the one we suspected was in my calf), but more in the deep veins that run along the front of the leg. The ultrasound didn't find a clot in those veins so they sent me home with orders to try to walk every couple of hours (since I'd been feeling like crap for over a week, I hadn't been getting much activity) and hydrate my body as much as I could since my blood was kind of thick which meant I was dehydrated (again!).

The next day my leg was actually feeling better so I thought I was on the mend. That night, I made dinner and by the time I sat down to dinner with the guys I just felt SO exhausted. Erik could hear it in my voice...it gets very hoarse when I'm super dehydrated (which makes sense really as my vocal folds are probably as dry as the rest of my body). I was talking to him about how I was feeling and was gesturing or signing (I can't remember) with my hands and I just dropped my hands in my lap and said "I'm so tired, even using my hands like this wears me out." He ordered me to keep drinking for the rest of the night and I agreed that dehydration was probably my biggest problem.

Some of you may wonder what my problem is with staying hydrated. Sometimes, it is just that I get busy and don't think about drinking. If I don't have something right by me, I get working and put it off until I've lost valuable hours of hydration opportunity, but lately I've been more diligent about making sure I always have something nearby.

Another factor that makes staying hydrated a challenge is that getting TOO much liquid on my stomach seems to make me nauseous. I can't drink straight water anymore (it upsets the Ph of my stomach and brings on instant nausea) so I always have to "doctor" it with at least a bit of lemon and stevia/splenda (I'm currently trying to switch from splenda to stevia and agave at the urging of my good friend Nick). So, I have to find the perfect "balance" between drinking enough to keep my body hydrated, yet not so much that it makes me nauseous. I still haven't gotten this down quite yet.

Finally, probably the BIGGEST foil to staying hydrated are my damn blood pressure meds. I've been on lisinopril HCTZ which has a diuretic in it so if I take it, it makes me instantly pee out most of the fluids I'm ingesting which means I have to drink twice as much as I probably would need to drink otherwise. My primary care doc recently prescribed the lisinopril without the diuretic, but I'm trying out the prescriptions by mail thing and it has taken them FOR-FREAKING-EVER to get my meds to me. I stopped my blood pressure meds for a week prior to the ER clot visit because of the hydration issues and my BP in the ER was super high so I had to start them again. I'm hoping the new BP meds come tomorrow. We'll see how I do without the diuretic. I'm hoping that the BP will eventually take care of itself as I get more weight off, but I don't know. I have a family history of high BP, so it may just be the luck of the draw. Regardless, getting the weight off and getting more active aren't going to make the problem worse right?

So....that brings us to Wednesday morning. I woke up for work and actually felt ok. I had absolutely NO appetite, but that isn't unusual for me really. I usually get signed in for work, get set up and then make myself a protein shake or coffee. I typically wait until my first break to make my breakfast. I noticed that I was having what felt like gas pains in my upper stomach area. It was the sort of pain/cramping that starts...gets worse as the gas expands an area of your intestine and then subsides. Although I'd only had a few bites of sausage and egg taco the night before (my first foray into low carb tortillas ...they were delicious by the way), I began to wonder if my rearranged guts were having a problem with the tortilla. I asked Erik how he was feeling and he mentioned that he wasn't feeling all that great either, but the night before he went on a binge that made me ill to watch so I couldn't really use him as a gauge. Tanner was fine so I couldn't figure out what was causing my problem. The pain seemed to get worse as time went by so I went and laid down in between calls hoping that if I straightened out, maybe the gas would work through my system. I even took some gas x strips to no avail.

I then realized that I had forgotten to take my effexor the day before and withdrawal from effexor can cause gastrointestinal problems so I took the pill and forced myself to eat a bite or two of the sausage and egg the night before to make sure it didn't upset my stomach. The food came right back up within a minute or two. I think it was at that point that I knew we weren't just dealing with a "gas" problem.

I told my supervisor that I wasn't feeling good and was going to have to go for the day and immediately called my doctor's office. The PA mentioned that sometimes bready products (even low carb products) can sometimes cause a blockage and that warm orange juice can sometimes help break it up. She made an appointment for me that afternoon, but told me to come in earlier if I had any other problems. I immediately warmed up some orange juice, took a few sips and within a minute was having a fairly violent vomiting episode. By then, I was shaking, white as a sheet and in such pain I was doing Lamaze breathing to cope. I texted Erik to come home and get me to the doctor.

We got to the doctor's office where they had me do a barium swallow. Even as sick as I was, I was AMAZED to SEE what my new stomach looked like on this test! Seriously guys, I had no freaking idea it was as small as it is. Just to give you a way to visualize it...my spine looked about the size of a sturdy PVC pipe and my stomach in comparison to that looked like a fuzzy piece of yarn...THAT THIN! Until she pointed it out, I was trying to figure out why the barium looked like it was going through a vein or artery when I knew it was moving through my digestive system. The "vein" was actually my stomach. Now granted, it wasn't full or stretched at all, but it certainly explains why a few bites fills me up...AMAZING.

We could see the barium work through my stomach and then just pool in an area just outside my stomach which made them think that I did have some kind of obstruction. They decided to admit me to the hospital so that they could get some bloodwork done and do a CT scan to see what was really going on.

They discovered that, once again, I was very dehydrated and started pumping me with fluids. I think I probably had about 5 bags of fluid before I even started peeing again (incidentally, I went into the hospital at 347 and came home at 358...I wasn't eating in the hospital so that should tell you how much they were pushing the fluids). The first CT they did showed that I had an area of my small intestine that was "thickened" and the blood supply to that area showed some irritation. They mentioned something about my white count being high and something else being out of whack. They said that what they saw could be caused by several different things ranging from a viral infection to Chron's disease. The only way to really diagnose the problem was to go in surgically, but of course nobody was interested in doing that right off the bat. They elected to keep me there for observation and redo the CT scan in a few days to see if it was resolving on its own.

That night I needed demerol to get any kind of sleep at all as the cramping was fairly constant. I seriously felt like I was in the final stages of labor as the pain had begun to radiate out to include my entire abdomen and back. Lying on my side hurt because any pressure on my abdomen hurt as if I had done a day's worth of situps or let someone use my abdomen for kick boxing practice. The demerol did help though and, apart from the fact that hospitals seem to think the middle of the freaking night is the perfect time to get all the ordered labwork done, I got some sleep.

To make this very long and probably very boring story just a tad shorter...I began to show improvement slowly. I was able to go for longer periods the next day without pain meds and soon, my bowel started talking to the nurses again and the next CT scan showed that whatever was going on in my small intestine seemed to be improving. The doctors are assuming I had some kind of infection in that section of my bowel which was probably complicated by the dehydration and I was discharged Friday evening.

Today is the first day I've felt somewhat like my old self although I'm still pretty gun-shy about eating. The last few days I lived on mashed potatoes and mac and cheese..totally NOT on my diet, but they were the only things that didn't make me want to hurl when I thought about eating. This morning I had a few bites of scrambled egg and chorizo and will probably attempt a protein shake here in a few minutes.

I think I'm probably over this latest hump, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it has really depressed me. I'll probably whine a bit more about that in another post though. I'll get over it and I'm sure as I start to feel better, it will subside, but for now....yeah I'm feeling pretty low :(

Incidentally, apart from the dehydration, I don't think this intestinal problem was due to the surgery at all. I probably would have gotten sick regardless of the surgery.