For everyone who has been asking for an update, here it is (do excuse the wordiness.....Nance promised me I could blame everything on the dilaudin....): How to explain the craziness of this last week………so much info, much of which still doesn’t quite compute….I’m writing this in part because so many of my friends have asked for an update and in part to try to make sense of it all. So here goes: what brought me to the emergency room last Sunday was excruciating pain unlike any I had ever felt before, pain that mimicked the pain of kidney stones, pain that brought me to my knees, literally. What kept me in the hospital was not the pain however – they were ready to send me home with no answers, no explanation, just possibilities and Percocet – what kept me there was a dangerously low level of sodium, so low that the emergency room doctor was concerned that if the level went any lower I could start having seizures. Thus began the mystery which I’m still not sure has been completely unraveled. After numerous x-rays, CT scans and MRIs, the consensus among a host of specialists was that the pain started in my lower back, wrapped around to the nerve traveling down my abdomen and groin and set off bursitis I didn’t even know I had in my hip. The inflammation became so severe that even with heavy-duty painkillers, any movement and especially attempts to stand or walk led to pain so intense that it literally took my breath away. At the same time, clearly something was going on with my kidneys and something was causing those sodium levels to drop. After days on a saline drip and fluid restriction, my sodium returned to normal and my kidneys went back to being fine but my blood pressure was sky rocketing and, not wanting to miss out on the action and attention, my heart decided to have a little episode of ventricular tachycardia, one that had the doctors were ready to move me to Telemetry or ICU. All of a sudden a tech was wheeling in an EKG machine and a physician from ICU appeared to quiz me on my cardiac history and check out the EKG results which luckily turned out to be normal, but that little blip meant 2 more days on the heart monitor. In the meantime, the doctors started me on Motrin and suddenly the pain began to lessen, proof that it was indeed the result of inflammation. Each day the nurses drew more and more blood from me and lab results revealed other issues, some of which began to offer answers to problems that I’ve been dealing with for the last few years. At some point along the way, my cardiologist stepped in and took over my case, determined to finally figure out what was going on with me; his counterpart on the hospital staff wanted to stay on my case because its complexity intrigued her (I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or terrified by that – I did begin to feel like part of an episode of HOUSE…). One of my friends – a nurse at JFK – told me that so often when a person is in the hospital bits and pieces of all these puzzles begin to be revealed, tests in search of certain answers yield others that no one was even looking for. That is precisely what happened: somewhere, in all those labs, my cardiologist saw enough evidence to make him bring in an endocrinologist who concluded that my thyroid was simply not working to capacity (this does seem to be the year of the thyroid), contributing to issues that haven’t made any sense until now and likely contributing as well to the drop in my sodium level. So where are we now…..still some pain and stiffness and so some work with a physical therapist; at least one more day in the hospital because I have to have a nuclear stress test tomorrow (my cardiologist is a little concerned about that blip on the heart monitor); the addition of blood pressure meds and thyroid meds with the hope that regulating or improving the function of my thyroid will help lower not only my blood pressure but also my cholesterol which recently, suddenly, went high enough that my doctor had to double my cholesterol meds to keep my numbers in an acceptable range. The fuller function of my thyroid should also address so many of the symptoms that my other doctors were attributing to silent reflux. What a bizarre experience this has been: is there any connection between the pain that led me to the emergency room and everything else we’ve discovered? There doesn’t seem to be but what does that matter? It’s as if this pain served its purpose well – will it force me to be better about doing my back exercises? Probably, for a week or 2…. But, in the long run, will it have contributed to improving my health? It certainly seems that way. Moreover, these last few days have helped me appreciate even more the people I love, the people who were there for me every step of the way, including a new friend who went out of her way to offer constant support and help me navigate the sometimes murky waters of a stay on 2East. And, as one of my friends suggested on FB, maybe the experience will lead to a screen play starring my wacky wacky roommate…let the casting begin!
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 17:13:24 +0000
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