Here's 2133 words about why I have been MIA.

**Warning, this post is incredibly long**

So this last week was crazy crazy for me! 

Let me explain: 

On Wednesday (the 7th) I woke up not feeling the best, but I worked and went to school through it. That day we also got cable!! (yay for new fall shows). I got home from work and school, and decided to take a nap. When I woke up, I felt worse. I thought that I might feel bad possibly from not being adjusted, and got into the chiropractor that day. I went to the chiropractor, and slept the rest of the night off. 

Then comes 2 am. I woke up at 2 am with the sharpest pain in my chest. Worst then the pain I experienced from carbon monoxide poisoning. (that's for another post). I rolled over to Dylan and said I think I need to go to the hospital. We then found ourselves at the Emergency room at 2:40ish on Thursday Morning. Because I was complaining of chest pain, its like ultimate complaint to the ER basically meaning try every test in the book. I have been sick my whole life with Acid Reflux Disease, and I knew that this could not just be a bad case of heartburn, but the PA thought otherwise, and gave me miralax and a numbing agent to try and get rid of my chest pain.  Five short minutes later, my pain was worse off than when I stepped foot into that ER. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, and this pain had me in tears. The nurse finally gave me some pain medicine that touched the pain, certainly not taking care of it. Another half hour goes by, and the tear wrenching pain is back. At this point, the PA resorted to giving me morphine, and something else (supposedly to help with the pain). I think the worst part about this is the morphine didn't help. I don't remember much after getting the morphine, but I do remember feeling like nothing was going to help this pain. 

By this time, the doctors were realizing that I wasn't just some girl complaining about heartburn.

 "We think you might have a blood clot in your lung"

One of the most terrifying sentences of my life. How would an otherwise healthy 21 year old get a blood clot in her lung? They then gave me an EKG, a chest X-Ray, and a CT scan hoping to find something. Its now around 4 am, and Dylan had called my Mom and Dad. They decided to come from Idaho Falls to be with me, and by the time they had gotten there it was around 4:45 am. After my test results came back, the doctor came back into my room. Luckily, no blood clot, but my CT was "inconclusive". The way my Dad explained it to me (at this time, I had NO idea what my doctor's/nurse's/family were saying) was that they found "something" on my CT scan with meant I have to have further testing to make sure I was okay. They suspected it was my Gallbladder because of the results of my CT. This is when I had an Ultrasound of my Gallbladder. The ultrasound took around an hour to complete. It was such a long process because the technician had to push on my gallbladder to get an image of it. This was the painful part. Every time she would push, I would cringe from pain. Because of this, I needed something called a HIDA scan. It is now around 9 am Thursday the 8th and they decided to release me to go home, with nausea medication and Vicodin, and scheduled me for the HIDA scan on Friday morning at 7 am. My parents went back to IF shortly after I was home on Thursday. I don't remember much of Thursday, from what Dylan says I spent most of the day sleeping. 

Then comes Friday morning, my HIDA scan. By Friday morning I was pretty unaware of my surroundings. I had been on pain medicine consistently for the past 28 hours, and everything seemed a little unreal. When I was in the hospital on Thursday morning, Cooper had knocked down his baby gate and decided that he was going to eat my one and only bra. I asked my mom to pick me up a bra at Victoria's Secret and bring it to me on Friday. She wanted to come with me to my HIDA scan so it worked out well. My mom was going to drive me to my scan so that Dylan could go to work. He took off the whole day on Thursday to be with me and make sure I didn't die, basically. One thing I do remember is that 7 am came VERY early. The worst part about this all is that I could barely walk. I was in so much pain in my abdomen that walking made it worse. The best way I could ever describe it was like someone was stabbing me in the gut, but turning their knife left and right. It was painful excruciating. It didn't take long to get situated at the hospital, and the radiologist took me right back to the test. What a HIDA scan measures is the output of your Gallbladder. Your gallbladder holds bile, and bile helps in the digestion process. Its basically a little sac off of your bile ducts that squeezes and releases bile and grabs it out of the liver. If the gallbladder is not working right, it will not squeeze and release the bile to help in digestion. This is very painful. 

In the Scan there are three parts. 

Part 1: "Cheeseburger Medicine". The point of a HIDA scan is to mimic your body's digestion process, and try and mimic the symptoms you experience. With the wonders of medicine (gag me now) someone decided they were going to develop a medicine that mimics what your body does after you eat a giant greasy cheeseburger. 

Let me do that math for you: 

nauseous

+ 

greasy cheeseburger medicine

+

gallbladder not working correctly 

= 

pain and nausea, lots and lots of pain and nausea. 

The medicine, needless to say, made me never ever ever want to eat a cheeseburger again in my life. Awesome. 

Part 2: "the scan". In this part of the scan is the actual SCAN part. You get injected with a radioactive isotope which is what the scan measures. the isotope is how the scanner knows if your gallbladder is working or not. The scanner is this huge machine that kinda looks like a CT scanner, but bigger. All you have to do is lay there for 40 minutes, strapped on a bed, after you have eaten (through my IV) a giant cheeseburger and radioactive isotopes. It sucked, and I couldn't wear my glasses so I couldn't see anything. 

Part 3: "Cheeseburger Medicine Strikes again". In the third part of the scan, they have 20 minutes to inject you with the cheeseburger medicine again to try and get the radioactive isotope out of your gallbladder. No one told me that the second greasy cheeseburger is worse than the first one. The tear wrenching pain has yet again returned, and I hate it. And the worst part, is she has to give the "medicine" to me gradually, so every five minutes, I get a "bite" of cheeseburger. yum. Luckily, this nauseous feeling only last about five minutes after the scan. After the scan was complete, they admitted me and then I got to play the waiting game.

Around 11 or 12 on Friday, the doctor finally came into my room and told me the results of my HIDA scan. At least he had a sense of humor: "You have a bad gallbladder". Typical working, or where the minimum working potential of a gallbladder is around 40%. Mine was working at 7%. Not too bad right? Without hesitation, the doctor explained to me that I needed to have it out, and soon. The downside, as he said, what that its major surgery. I knew that with school and work having it done sooner would be better, so we opted to have the surgery done that day. The surgeon was nice enough to tell us that some insurance companies will not cover the surgery if its done as "emergent" without prior authorization. Great. Now comes more waiting.

 My Mom immediately got on the phone with the insurance to find out about how to prior authorize this surgery. Turns out, you basically have to be ON YOUR DEATH BED for insurance companies to prior authorize anything over the phone. So, to get prior authorization, you have to send your medical records, and the surgeon has to fill out like 6 pages of paper work basically saying you will die without the surgery. Sweet. So this takes another 2 hours, and by that time, I just want to go home and EAT. (Let me paint you a picture. I didn't feel well on Wednesday. Wednesday I didn't eat because I didn't feel well. Thursday I slept. And was nauseous. Its Friday at 12 pm, I am HUNGRY STARVING). The case worker (who was working on my case) submitted the paperwork and around 2:15 they released me from the hospital and my Mom and I made a b-line to Fred Meyer. The told me when I was released that I would get a call when they got Prior authorization to have the surgery. We got like $150 worth of groceries and lets just say I couldn't wait to get home. We decided to stop by Sonic, and get a drink, I really wanted a watermelon slushie. Yum. As the server was bringing our drinks to the car window, my phone rings. I didn't recognize the number, so I picked up.
  IT WAS THE SURGEON SAYING THEY GOT PRIOR AUTHORIZATION,
not even and hour after I was released. Lets just say I was upset. The way most surgeries work is you can't eat so many hours before, luckily for me, I hadn't eaten anything in DAYS. Talk about FRUSTRATING. So, with the go ahead on surgery, we rushed the groceries home, and sped past two state troopers (Eek mom!) to get to the hospital in a half hour (all the time the surgeon gave me to get there). All while this is happening, My Dad is SPEEDING from Idaho Falls to get to the hospital before my surgery. We got to the hospital, got checked in, and I was in pre-op all within 15 minutes, if that. In the nick of time, my dad showed up as they were wheeling me out of pre-op into surgery. He was so happy that he was able to give me a hug and kiss before I went under. I don't remember much after seeing my dad, they had given me something to "relax" me before I went into the OR. 

I wake up at around 5:30ish I think? Haha. There are two stages of recovery, Recovery 1: just you and the staff, and Recovery 2: where your family is. I remember waking up and wanting something to Drink. And a nurse shoving pain pills down my throat. I made it out of Recovery 1 pretty quickly, and finally saw everyone in Recovery 2. Dylan was there with my Mom, Dad, brother and sister-in-law. One thing I remember most is trying to walk. I guess I was sOo high messed up from my pain medicine that I tried walking and couldn't because I was so dizzy, and then I started crying. So the nurse said that all of my family had to leave, and only one person could stay with me so I could take a nap. Apparently, I told my Mom and Dad that they were being annoying. oops. I finally am able to leave the Hospital at around 6:30 pm on Friday the 9th. 

Talk about a whirlwind weekend. 

17 hours in the hospital

 6 tests

3 IV's

1 obnoxious insurance company

1 Surgery 

And a diagnosis of Gallbladder Disease.

Now if I could just get rid of these nasty wounds...

...luckily cholecystectomy is laproscopic yay small scars! 

( I just wanted to let all the interwebs know that I love my family, and I could not have done this alone. My parents are the best most caring people in the world, and my Brother and Sister-in-law are irreplaceable. Not to mention, I have the best Boyfriend in the world, who took a day off work to make sure I was okay, and stayed with me in the hospital at 3am, when I was snoozing, and he was wide awake on the chair next to me. I am so blessed to have these amazing people in my life, to be well, not sick anymore and ALIVE!!)

And you made it! 2133 words later...

Until next time.