Another holiday weekend ruined.

Swedish Medical Center in Ballard - very nice facility,
although I wish I didn' t know it quite so well...

Thank you, Dr. King, for a lovely three-day weekend. We had planned to head up to Mt. Baker with some of our dearest friends for the weekend, but instead ended up in the Emergency Room. Not awesome.

Holidays have really been a bummer this year. I caught a horrible stomach bug over Thanksgiving, and Stew and I were both very sick with head colds and sore throats for Christmas. And now we can also write off MLK Day as a loss.

We were going to leave first thing Saturday morning with Tara, Andrew, Alissa and Matt for a weekend up at Mark's condo at Mt. Baker. I was super excited because I still haven't been on my snowboard this year! But I woke up that morning at 5:00 with a pretty bad stomachache. By the time Stew got home from work at 8:00 I was literally screaming, crying, and vomiting because the pain was so bad. I was very, very scared because I've never felt anything like that before.

We rushed down to Swedish Medical Center in Ballard and were brought back right away, I'm sure in large part due to my screaming and carrying on. Staying calm and rational was not a possibility at that point.

The next six hours consisted on my part of more puking, yelling, and crying with pain. I had my blood drawn and tested, internal and external ultrasounds, a pelvic exam, and lots and lots of pain medication administered through an IV. The meds didn't last too long though, and about every hour they would wear off and I would start writhing in pain again, so they just kept me pretty doped up the whole time.

All of the tests came back normal except the internal ultrasound revealed possible early appendicitis, but they were very reluctant to do a CT scan on me because of how dangerous the radiation can be for young women. So they sent us home with four different prescriptions and orders to come back in another 12 hours.

I had a pretty bad night, still in lots of pain in spite of the Vicodin, but by the time we got back to the ER the next morning my pain was mostly gone. So they sent us home with instructions to follow up with a GI doctor as soon as possible, basically chalking things up to severe IBS. The wait list for a GI doctor is approximately one month. In the meantime I was able to schedule an appointment with my regular doctor who wanted to re-run all the ER testing to see if anything had changed, and then refer me to a different GI doc who may be able to get me in more quickly. That was yesterday afternoon.

In the meantime my symptoms have only gotten worse and I spent most of last night crying in pain and taking Vicodin every three hours which kind of helped dull the pain. I left my doctor a message a few hours ago about the test results and her recommendations (and the fact that I'm running out of pain meds) but I haven't heard anything back yet.

So... not a stellar weekend for us, and I'm afraid I may be dying... or at the very least passing a kidney stone.

I asked Stew, "Do you remember when we promised to stick by each other, for better or for worse? This is worse."