Current Events

This past Friday, I got sick. It felt like a stomach bug or possibly food poisoning. There was a lot of stomach pains and some throwing up. It lasted through Sat & Sun. By Monday, things were calming down but I still felt like hammered crap. I took Tues off of work and things started looking up. Tues night and Wednesday, I was feeling better.

Then on Thursday, things got worse.. I threw up twice at work. Then I took the rest of the day off and went to an Immediate Care Facility. They did some testing, and I got insanely worse. The pain got worse and worse and the throwing up got more frequent. I was then shipped via ambulance to St. Joseph's hospital, where they gave me some excellent medication (a.k.a. drugs) and took the pain away. You know, they say that the lack of pain can have a narcotic effect, and I'm here to say, that is ABSOLUTELY true.

The downside to staying out of pain: not eating anything. AT ALL. Since Thursday morning, I have not eaten a single thing. I'm on IV fluids. Which is good, given how dehydrated I was after all the throwing up. For those of you out there trying to lose weight, I would NOT recommend this type of diet. Being tethered to a steadily beeping machine that prevents you from sleeping properly and follows you everywhere is NOT a good way to live. And it's especially torturous given how many food commercials there are on tv. Honestly, I've never really noticed how many until this weekend. Although, IHOP's beef & bacon burgers look REALLY GOOD!!!

 The other key thing that happened at St. Joseph's is that I found out the cause of my troubles: gall stones. Yep, I got gall stones and they started getting uppity and pissing off my pancreas and liver (which release enzymes to help digestion). Not eating gives my system a chance to clear out the gall stones in my system now. But that's only a temporary fix.

Apparently, to clear this up, I have to have my gall bladder removed since this is the source of the gall stones. So, to be safe, the doc put me up in a nice room at St. J's. I found this out on Thursday night, after which my cell phone died. So I was off the grid for Fri & Sat. I used the room phone to reach out to some family and Sat night, I got my cell charger and some other necessities. So, I'm back online and putting the word out on my current situation. At the moment, I'm waiting to hear on the results of the MRI exam I took in this machine that looked like a combination of a Cryo-Sleep chamber and a Photon Torpedo tube (with radio, no less!) on Sat.

Honestly, I'm nervous about the gall bladder removal on Monday. The part that I find surprising is that I'm not as scared as I think I should be. I think it's because I got through all that ten years ago when I had my appendix removed. Given my weight, there are some concerns with anesthesia, but nothing too alarming. I hope it goes well. I'll let you know how it goes.