Pain: Part One

Wow. It's been a very long week and a half 'round these parts. Where oh where to even begin?

So, two Monday's ago I landed in the ER in Duluth. I had gone to Duluth all by myself to go to a friends house and to run some errands. I made it to visit my friend Melissa and I wasn't feeling too good. My stomach felt off... not a sick off, like the flu, but it was semi painful and extremely uncomfortable. I wasn't sure what was going on. It was kind of a normal pain for me because it resembled the pain like I got from eating wheat, but the problem was, I didn't eat any wheat that morning and it wasn't extremely painful (yet) like when I would eat wheat... it was strange for me and I wasn't really sure what was going on.

I went from Melissa's home and headed to the mall to run some errands. I made it to the first store and life quickly started to turn on me. My stomach was feeling more and more painful and it was getting hard to walk, move, breath... anything. I made the foolish decision to continue shopping. I decided that things needed to 'get moving' in my stomach and walking would help that out. So I walked deeper into the mall and headed to Yonkers. Such a bad idea.

In Yonkers the situation went from really bad to worse in a matter of minutes. I was soon laying on the floor in a dressing room in excruciating pain trying to figure out how in the world I was going to get out to my car. I laid there for a good long while and things were not getting better. I finally got up and the world was a bit on the fuzzy, spinning side of things. I thought I was going to end up passed out in the middle of the aisle. A worker there asked me if I was feeling alright, apparently I looked like a sheet of paper.

I made the very long and beyond painful walk back to my car. A smart person may have had someone call 911 for her... I was not smart at that point.

I got out to my car and laid in the back seat for a bit but I knew something was not right. Something felt off (you know, besides the fact that it was excruciatingly painful). I decided to head down to urgent care at St. Mary's hospital which I found very hard to find and ended up accidentally parking over three blocks away in a parking ramp and had to ask for directions and then walk the rest of the way myself. Apparently, I looked like crap enough for someone to call ahead warning them that someone was looking for Urgent Care and was about to keel over because a police officer found me on my way asking if I was the 'the one' looking for Urgent Care and no matter how embarrassing at the point I may have looked I have never been so happy to see someone looking for me before.

By the way... if you are in extreme pain. DON'T drive yourself to the hospital. I think I almost caused a few accidents along the way. It was a dumb move.

I got down to Urgent Care, the doctor looked at me for maybe two minutes before telling me I needed to be transferred to the ER. At this point I finally started trying to call my family to tell them what was going on but no one answered. I left messages with a few people but failing to get ahold of anyone for quite some time.

In the ER I got looked over and they drew blood and got an IV going. They gave me something for the pain which made me loopy but I was ever so thankful. From the time I started to feel my stomach feeling off/painful to the time I got pain meds was over 7 hours... it was a long 7 hours!

Anyway, tests came back and it determined that my liver, gallbladder, and bile duct were infected due to stones in my gallbladder and things weren't working properly. So they kept me over night and scheduled me for surgery the next morning to remove my gallbladder.