2007-10-21

Can I stop being sick now?

Three weeks ago, I was sitting in church, and I started to get a cramp in my stomach. This was about quarter to 10 in the morning. About quarter to 11, it was getting worse, so I spent some time in the bathroom to try and get whatever what was in there causing problems, out. I got plenty of crap out (so to speak), but the pain persisted.

I got my family home quickly, and since it was Fast Sunday, my wife thought it was probably hunger-related, so she gave me an ice cream sandwich. It did nothing for me, and I took myself upstairs and laid on the floor outside the bathroom waiting for whatever was in my stomach to pass in one direction or another and get out. The pain just kept getting worse and worse. Nothing came out the back, and the most I could do the other way was dry heave. My wife wanted to take me to the emergency room, which I resisted for some time -- if I was going to be miserable and (as I assumed) in need of a bathroom at some indeterminate yet immediate point, I'd rather be at home than in an uncomfortable hospital emergency room where my chances of immediate attention would be slim. After a while, though, the pain was just too intense, and I couldn't take it anymore.

Fortunately, the hospital was fairly new, and pretty vacant on a Sunday afternoon. I was hooked up on painkillers administered by IV. Initially, they figured it was a kidney stone, so they did a CAT scan. Sitting perfectly still and holding your breath is not easy when you're in intense pain (even on painkillers). The scan came up negative for kidney stones, but it did show that my appendix was on the edge. If the pain was in the right side, they would have been calling for an appendectomy, but since it was on the left, they weren't sure exactly what it was. They just kept me on painkillers until either the pain passed so I was able to go home, or they could figure out what to do for me.

Eventually, my wife had to take the kids home, so she did so and made me an overnight bag. Then she called our home teachers to come deliver the bag and give me a blessing.

After the blessing, the pain moved over to the right side of my stomach. Unfortunately, they had decided to admit me to the hospital proper, a process that took a couple hours, during which the ER doctor wasn't interested in me (since I was supposed to be out of there, and with a football game just ending and people starting their stupid party tricks, they were starting to get busy), so it took some time before I could get seen. Once I got checked into my room, though, I could talk to the nurse and tell her what was going on, and she got the on-call surgeon, and he confirmed the appendix needed to come out.

Well, everything went pretty fine, all things considered, and I came home a couple days later. It took some time to recover, and fortunately I have a job where I could work from home. After a week and a half or so, though, just as the antibiotics wore off, I started feeling sick again. My wife was coughing a bit, so I figured I just caught whatever was going around. But after a week of this, I went in to see my doctor (I had already had this appointment as a follow-up to some migraine treatment), and he diagnosed me with atypical pneumonia.

This was just a few days ago. I'm just finishing up the antibiotics for this, so hopefully I'll stop coughing and being tired and out of breath soon. I am concerned, though, because last year I had a sinus infection that took two courses of antibiotics to cure, and it ended up killing all the wrong bacteria in my gut and I had to go on another set of medication to put everything right again. I really want to avoid that this time around. :-/

No comments: