Friday, July 23, 2010

When stoic equals stupid!

After a fun weekend of family get togethers and babysitting our wonderful grandchildren, I woke up at my sister's house on Tuesday, the 13th, about 3 a.m. with intense abdominal cramping.  Cramping led to the usual intestinal problems for the next few hours and I assumed that I had a really bad case of food poisoning.  Being a mom and a grandmother, my first thoughts were to run through what we had eaten in hopes that no one else shared my pain!  I traced my dilemma to a fast-food salad eaten at lunch the day before.

We were due to meet Matt, our son, for a quick lunch at an Indian restaurant in the San Fernando Valley before returning home.  I nixed the Indian food, obviously, and nixed the lunch as well.  Just get me home, I said to DH!  I dosed off and on in the car on the way home and realized I was running a slight temp.  The rest of Tuesday was spent dozing, eating nothing, and just generally being miserable.  I now had my ailment pegged as an intestinal virus.  Oh, no!  What if I infected the kids and Sara has 3 toddlers all sick with the yuckies at the same time?  I warned the family - my sister Lysoled her guest bathroom.

Tuesday night, around 10:30 p.m., I was hit with a wave of the most painful cramping I have ever had - worse than labor pains, I assure you.  We had already decided that Doug should sleep in the guest room because I knew I would keep him up with my tossing and turning, fever, bathroom visits, etc.  I was literally doubled over in pain for 10-15 minutes before I could get control and limp down the hall to tell him I needed to go to the ER.  Doug was scheduled to get up early on Wednesday and drive to the Carlsbad house since the carpet was going to be installed.  Obviously, my ailment was poorly timed!  We went back and forth for a few minutes and figured we'd probably sit in the ER all night, we didn't have a fallback plan for getting the house open for the carpet installers, etc., etc.  So, stoic that I am, I said I would take some pain meds that I had in the house from last summer's undiagnosed gut pain and try to tough it through the night.  Big mistake.  Bad judgment.  Stupid.  Stupid.  Stupid.  Why can't I ever put myself first?

Wednesday morning, Doug made a quick turnaround trip to Carlsbad to let the installers in and arrange for a neighbor to secure the house when they finished.  I called my doc (who is no longer my doc) and described my symptoms.  Rather than have me come in for an office visit, my doc had her nurse call to say it sounded like a viral infection that needed to run its course.  Keep fluid intake up, soft mild diet, etc.  In other words, suck it in, Marsha, and deal with it!

After another very uncomfortable night Wednesday, I told Doug on Thursday morning that we had to go to urgent care.  We were there when they opened the doors at 9 a.m.  It didn't take the doctor more than 2 minutes to diagnose my problem, give me a shot of Demerol, and send me off to the emergency room.  By 5 p.m., my surgeons were ready to go.  I had a laparoscopic appendectomy.  My appendix had burst (probably sometime Tuesday or Wednesday), my gut was full of nasty bacterial stuff, they had to rinse me out several times (thankfully, I was dead to the world on anaesthetics), and I woke up hooked up to more tubes than I had ever seen!  Massive doses of antibiotics to prevent continued infection, drainage tube, naso-gastric tube, oxygen, catheter, IVs - a true sick person!

And an unhappy surgeon telling DH that we were less than 24 hours from sepsis - systemic infection.  Suck it in and deal with it, Marsha, was obviously not the best choice.

No comments:

Post a Comment