:: Mindrella's Life ::

:: Friday, December 24, 2004 ::

Merry Christmas To All My Friends!

I know I haven't updated in a while but I wanted to wish all .87 readers that I have a Merry Christmas.

On that note, I must share with you my most recent adventure. I'll try and keep it as goreless as possible. It started out harmless enough. I woke up Sunday morning extremely nauseous, in pain and all the "other" fun stuff that goes with all that. "Not to worry" I told myself, "I must just be suffering from something that I ate at Jonathan's party last night." After spending some time in the reading room I went on with the 567854432677778909 things that I had to get done before Woody's surprise 40th birthday party at 2 p.m. that afternoon. Funny thing is, it wasn't getting any better and every effort I made to relieve the nauseousness in my stomach seemed to fail (I won't go into any details but you get the picture). I then decided that maybe I had some sort of stomach virus and cancelled any plans I had on attending Woody's party. Around 3:30 p.m. I finally couldn't stand it anymore and was frantically searching through my address book for someone who (a) wasn't already at Woody's party (I really didn't want to ruin his birthday, it was bad enough that I wasn't there) and (b) who was still around for the holidays, to take me to Urgent Care. I finally got a hold of someone who showed up with her boyfriend, kid and niece and they drove me to Urgent Care. There it was determined that I was not suffering from any food indulgences or a stomach virus but most likely from either pancreatitis or gall stones. Of course in order to determine this I must go to the hospital ER for more tests that they couldn't do there. I mean, after all, I was only in Urgent Care. It's not like they the facilities to actually . . . . hmmmm . . . help people who show up? Naw. That would make way too much sense. So my friend and her entourage came and got me, drove me to the ER where my friend was gracious enough to sit through the whole check in process with me to make sure I was okay. I finally convinced her that I would be okay by myself and that I would call her when I was ready to leave so she wouldn't have to stick around.

In the ER they took blood, did an EKG and then an ultrasound (only after giving me morphine for pain and something else for my nauseousness) only to determine two things:

Good News: I did not have pancreatitis or gall stones
Bad News: My white blood cell count was through the roof so I had a major infection somewhere.

Which resulted in one thing, I needed a catscan. Which resulted in another thing - I had to drink that nasty, nasty, ultra gross barium compound liquid that innocently disguises itself to look like 7-Up. Now on a good healthy stomach where nothing is going on in it's hard enough to swallow and keep down, in a stomach that's on it's last leg and extremely fragile I wasn't so sure. After all I've had to down at least 3 beakers of this stuff in the last year and it's always a sketchy proposition at best. I did my best got all of it down and only about half came back up - wha? oh sorry. No gory details. Okay, so around 11:30 p.m. (yeah you read right 11:30 p.m.) they came and got me and I had my catscan. Around 12:30 a.m. one of the nurses came in and said "Guess what? You have appendicitis. The doctor is on his way in to perform surgery and we've already started the paperwork to admit you." SIGH!

So to make an extremely long story somewhat manageable and bearable to all you .87 readers, I was wheeled out of ER, to the OR and my appendix was taken out. The evening nurse the next day said she had never seen someone admitted so fast in her life. They were calling me the whirleybird patient. I'm now home (I was released Tuesday night) and slowly recovering. The doctor told me that my appendix had already started to leak so they couldn't remove it laproscopically. I actually have a 2 inch incision but all in all it still isn't bad. Needless to say work is out of the question this week. As for next week, I'm not sure. I thought Christmas would be a disaster as well since I hadn't even started my shopping yet but Doug came to the rescue and took me out for a couple of hours yesterday so I could finish that. I'm just happy I decided to go to Urgent Care in the first place. I normally just try and tough it out because I don't like the hassle of going to the doctor. I'm glad I overruled myself this time.

Anyway, that's my latest adventure. I have more adventures to share with all of you, like my "almost got stuck in Lake Tahoe" adventure over Thanksgiving weekend but that's for another day. I'm pooped and need to lie down again for a little bit. Plus I have presents to wrap. And yes, I'm fine. A little slow right now but fine.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

:: Melinda 1:38 PM [+]