This morning at about 4:30, I woke up with severe lower abdominal pain. It was probably indigestion, I knew. But it was the worst abdominal pain I can remember ever having, besides the time in the hospital nine years ago when exploratory surgery revealed that my appendix had burst.
I tried going to the bathroom, but while I was marginally successful in that effort, the pain didn’t go away. I tried relaxing my muscles as much as possible. I went back to bed and did my best to lie still and relax. But the pain just wouldn’t go away.
On my way back to the bathroom I suddenly realized I was going to throw up…and I did, and from the horrible burning I’m guessing it was mostly bile. I kept throwing up and it didn’t make me feel any better; the pain was still there and now my throat was raw and stinging. I was near tears as I left the bathroom again.
So I got dressed and asked Sean to take me to the ER. We went up the street to Doctor’s Hospital.
I was in pain for the whole ride, and as I walked in, and as I sat down and filled out the paperwork. But after that the pain started to subside, of course.
They took my blood pressure several times, and my temperature, and did something to my finger, and then they put me in a room and had me give them a urine sample. The doctor came in eventually and did a standard examination. Eventually it was decided that since the pain had gone away, he’d give me a prescription for pain and nausea and I could then follow up with my GP. We waited on the urine test results, which were normal, and then Sean took me home.
Due to the drugs they gave me while I was there, or maybe because I was just tired in general, I slept until 6:20 in the afternoon. I did wake up long enough around 9 o’clock to call in to work, fortunately.
While I slept I had a couple of bad dreams. The first one involved one of my side teeth breaking into pieces. In the second one, my cousin Carl was married and had a baby, and the whole family had moved to Iraq for missionary work, and they’d been killed there. I actually woke up wanting to call my mom to make sure that wasn’t true.
Since I slept past the end of the standard business day, I wasn’t able to call my GP to talk about my ER adventure, and I missed a call from my endocrinologist. Also, I need to contact the people who made my glasses about the weird imperfection in the right lens that refracts light from monitors and makes it seem like there’s a big fingerprint on the glasses. Kind of distracting :P
So I’ll try to get all my calls done tomorrow during my lunch break, I guess.
Another sucky thing about all this is that I was already out of sick days at work, which means I have two unpaid days this week. I could use vacation for them, but then I would have fewer vacation days…:P
My boss has been very understanding of all this so far, but I imagine she’s getting tired of it. I am too.
I just want things to go back to normal.