Wednesday, January 14, 2009

365: 1/14 - EAT YOUR VEGGIES!!!

Sorry I haven't written in a few days. Honestly, I don't know how many people read my blog, or if anyone checks it daily, but if there is someone who does, sorry I haven't written in a few days. Project 365 is going to have a serious gap in it, thanks to my little "vacation".

It all started Saturday, wait, not really, it all started a few weeks ago. I was having abdominal pain at times, but refused to go get it cheked out. I figured it was nothing, maybe a urinary infection, maybe gas, who knows...but I'm entirely too busy to go sit at the doctor just to be told its something as silly as gas. So I avoided the situation, worked through the pain and went on about my life. I cut out sodas and drank more and more water and thought it would just go away if I ignored it. Nevermind that at one point it was so bad that I sat in the bathtub and cried.

So anyway, back to Saturday. We had decided that it was a "house" day. We would go and work on the house. My objecive for the day was to wash down all the walls inside the house so that Vaughn could texture them, while he worked on the gas line outside. Unfortunately, he can't run the gasline to the house until he cuts through like a foot of tree root, yay, gotta love tree roots!!

So with objective "Wash Walls" in mind I ran to Wal-Mart to buy a cheapie sponge mop, to eliminate climbing up and down a ladder, since I was not blessed with height. Right in the middle of the store, the abdominal pain hit me, I was doubled over in the middle of the mop aisle. The pain didn't stop but the intensity waned a bit, so I didn't tell anyone, I just went on. I went back to the house and scrubbed two rooms.

When we went back to the apartment for lunch, I couldn't bear the pain any longer. I laid on the sofa and cried and cried. Vaughn put his foot down, "You HAVE to go get this checked out!" I told him to go work on the gas line and I would go get it looked at and call him if I needed him.

So off I went. To the Borger ER. I waited, painfully, but
patiently in the waiting room for probably two hours. Mind you, I'm not complaining at all. The staff was very courteous and at least I didn't have to wait for like 6 hours like I would have in Amarillo. So I guess my POTD (picture of the day)for Saturday is this lovely view of the inside of the Borger ER waiting room.

So Dr. Moriber takes a look at me and the concern on his face was evident. He truly cared about my pain and wanted to find out where it was coming from. There was no sonogram technician available on the weekend so, he said I would need a CT Scan. At this point I was scared, I called Vaughn and I swear he was there before I hung up the telephone.

My friend Kathy came down from X-ray and brought me three cups full of contrast to drink. I told her that she wasn't my friend anymore, but she put some raspberry crystal light in them and restored our friend status. She said that the nurses would be in shortly to give me an IV and some pain medicine and she explained the CT procedure and that she would have to inject more contrast into my IV when we got upstairs in two hours.

Jaime and Monica, already my friends from when I worked at the Borger Hospital, were my nurses and they did their very best to take care of me. (Side note: please remember my friend Monica and her baby boy, Aidan,in your prayers. He is a tiny baby and has to have open heart surgery when he is three months old.) They started me an IV, drew blood for labs, and brought me pain and nausea medicine. They seemed to understand that my sweet cowboy and I were a bit scared and they did their best to lighten the mood.

Two hours later, after the contrast had had time to run through my organs, I was taken to CT. Many of us beleive that we can hold our breath for a long time...yeah, well that time is vastly shortened when you're watching a countdown timer to the moment when you can breathe again. In that machine, thirty seconds seemed like an eternity.

Anyway, after the CT, we find out that my doctor was gone. Shift had changed and a new doc was on in the ER. Since I don't want to make this guy look bad because of his lack of concern and care and his total disregard for people, I will call him Dr. Unhappy and not share his name. So, Dr. Unhappy comes in and with his eyes closed gives me a lot of nonsense about irritated bowels and a pus pocket on my colon. Thanks for being so precise, doc. He tells us that a surgeon needs to look at this and there is not one on at the hospital on the weekend, so they were going to send me in an ambulance to Amarillo. (All this still with his eyes closed. Dude totally refuses to treat us as humans, like he's afraid he might have to deal with emotion or something.) I do NOT want to go in the ambulance, but was told if I go in my own car, the hospital in Amarillo can make me wait in the ER waiting room until the end of eternity. So, off in the ambulance I go.

In Amarillo, I get a really nice doctor and a surgeon that reminds me of the Chief on Grey's Anatomy, just a nice, caring old guy. They are the ones who explain diverticulitis to me. The explain to me that my life has now changed, my diet will never be the same again. They say that I will need IV antibiotics and possibly surgery. They take my CT to their computer to try to read it to find out what to do next.

That's all I can handle for now...to be continued in a little while.

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