I'm Back

I know, you didn't even know I was gone, right? Yeah, that's the way things work these days, sometimes people disappear and you don't even notice they are gone till much later, sort of like that favorite comic strip that you used to read every day and then one day you notice that you haven't read it in weeks and only then do you realize that it has been ousted from the pages of your newspaper.

So, I'm back. I was only gone for a short time, but it feels like it was a lot more. It started Saturday evening with a pain on my right side, just under the diaphragm. It felt like a hunger pang, so I paid no attention to it and ate a little; but it didn't go away. It wasn't a bad pain, just a little irritating, so I ate some more (this gorging on food consisted of a Healthy Choice pizza [not recommended] and a Healthy Choice dinner [not too bad]) and it filled me up, but that little nagging pain remained. Much later on I had a few grapes as a snack and about fifteen minutes after that all hell broke loose inside my body.

That little pain mushroomed in size and became a consistent pressure, like really bad gas, that surged across my body along the course of my diaphragm. Burping brought no relief and the pressure kept mounting. I knocked back two Pepcid to no affect. And then I began to vomit, also to no affect; the pressure kept increasing and with it the pain. I went up stairs and told my wife something was wrong with me and then I went and vomited again. When I came out of the bathroom my wife was dressed and ready to take me to the hospital. It took another 45 minutes of pain and more vomiting for me to agree with her.

The waiting room was the worst part; I was pounding on my head and gnawing at my knuckles, anything to get my mind off the waves of pure agony that coursed through me. Eventually they admitted me to the ER and gave me a shot of something that did not work. Next they gave me a shot of that liquid bliss called morphine and within minutes my agony became a dull ache I could easily live with.

They said it was my gall bladder, then gallstones, then pancreatitis caused by gallstones, then pancreatitis caused by an unknown agent. The only way to deal with pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas, is to give the pancreas nothing to do and the only way to do that is to not eat. I spent Sunday in the hospital eating the occasional ice chip and nothing more. Every three to four hours as the pain came back I was given another shot of morphine. By Monday morning I was going about nine hours between morphine injections and feeling not too bad.

I saw a doctor on Monday around noon who told me that I did not have gallstones, or pancreatitis, and in fact they did not know what was wrong with me, but that they were going to let me go home anyway. I was feeling good and had a last morphine injection at about 3:00PM on Monday and was released about 6:30. But they had given me somethings to eat, broth and jello and the like and there was some discomfort in my stomach. By the time I went to bed at around 9:30 I would have killed for a morphine shot.

The original pain was gone, but it felt, and still feels, like a baseball bat was taken to my abdomen, like every organ in my digestive system is black and blue. It was a hard night, made only slightly better by Tylenol.

So I'm back and feeling like crap and unable to move much and unable to sit much and unable to lay down much, which pretty much means I cannot in any way get comfortable. But I'm back.