So this rapidly got too long for a FB status, but people wanted to know how I was doing.
For those who missed the memo: the constant excruciating back pain I've been whinging about for the last four to five months morphed into excruciating abdominal pain and vomiting on Saturday morning. It didn't let up, and after twelve hours of not keeping anything (ANYTHING) down, we came to the ER, and I've been in the hospital since Saturday night. Turns out? Gallstones, blockage of the bile duct. Surgical fix, but a relatively simple one now that they know what's actually the problem.
Emotionally, I'm a mess. I miss my baby. John brought JJ in to see me yesterday after his appointment (poor baby got a couple of shots), and all JJ wanted to do was sit on my lap and nurse. Which, thankfully, his doctor and mine both said was okay, because I was getting seriously baby-bonding deprived. John is being an awesome amazing rock star daddy about maintaining JJ's usual routine as much as possible, and JJ isn't giving him too much trouble about going to sleep and so forth. They brought me a decent quality breast pump, so I've been able to maintain my supply while I'm here, and while tired and kinda wrung out, emotionally there's nothing going on that a night in my own bed with my husband at my back and my son in my arms won't fix.
Physically, that's a different story. Two days in a row the same nurse blew off my requests for pain control for nearly an hour. And no, I wasn't early... it had been over 18 hours since I'd even asked for any, I was largely pain free most of yesterday, but started to hurt in the evening and called for meds at about 8:30. By the time she finally brought the morphine last night, it was 9:15, I was curled up in a ball and crying, and it didn't work. I told her half an hour later it wasn't working. I told her an hour after the dose that it wasn't working, and asked her to call the doctor. She blew me off again, even though I was back to shivering and fighting tears at that point.
Then shift change hit, and last night it was extra crazy and the new nurse (who was lovely, btw) didn't get to me until after 12:30a. So of course that dose of morphine didn't do much either, knocked it back some but not nearly enough to let me sleep. This nurse, however, paid attention when I told her it wasn't working. She called the doctor, got me switched to something stronger, and stayed right on top of things. She stuck her head in every time she passed my room to let me know where things stood, even when she was busy, and as soon as the order came through from the pharmacy at 2 she brought it so I could get some sleep. She also stood there and held my hand and listened while I bawled for a few minutes and got the upset out of my system as the drugs kicked in, so that helped a lot too.
So now I'm back on whichever drug it was they gave me in the ER. It makes me dizzy as hell, and I'm typing lying down because I get sick if I'm upright. I'm out of it enough to tell random orderlies that they're "cute", babble endlessly at whomever stands still long enough to catch my attention, and my skin ITCHES, but it *is* a damn near total pain-kill. My daytime nurse is wonderful, and she's in charge of assignments for this evening, so she's promised I'll get somebody else tonight.
In other news: there's a procedure this morning that I understand, but I'm too fuzzy to explain, and then either tonight or tomorrow morning they're going to remove my gallbladder. Barring complications, I should be home tomorrow night or Thursday, up and around Friday/Saturday, and done being sore by the middle of next week.
Then I get to have the awesome fun of figuring out how to accommodate the change in how my body digests food. Fun times, right? *shrug* I need to lose weight anyway. I have decided consider this my body refusing to let me have any more excuses.
Wish me luck!
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