Pelvic Pain, Part II

Mar 20, 2007 04:26

This is a continuation of my last post, which was just some lengthy backstory about an episode of pelvic ouchiness I experienced some years back.

I meant to write up this stupid second part days and days ago, but of course it didn't happen. I had half of it done and sitting around on my computer unfinished, and then I was always either too busy or too tired.

I feel like whatever was driving me to write this down has run out of steam, but I suppose I should finish it anyway.



I've never found any real explanation for what happened that time. It's hung around at the back of my head for years. I considered asking about it at ask_a_nurse, but asking about something that happened several years ago seemed like a frivolous question to bother them with.

Then a few weeks back, I discovered that WebMD has a new interactive "symptomchecker" feature. (At least...I think it's new. I'll feel really silly if I find out that it's been around forever. But then, I have rarely used WebMD before.) I'd tried looking up that pelvic pain episode on WrongDiagnosis.com, but their system is a labyrinth, and a total disaster for the ADDer to navigate...I believe it suggested that I'd had a miscarriage. (Um.) So the WebMD version was cool to find.

The Symptom Checker's top suggestions:

-Dysmenorrhea [You have bad cramps. We have no idea why.]

-Dysfunctional uterine bleeding. [You bleed too much, too little, or too randomly. We have no idea why.]

-Endometriosis ["MY WORLD IS A CROTCH." Or at least the rest of your body.]

-Uterine fibroids [I totally want to work in the House clinic patient with the 30-pound tumour on her ovary, but I can't quite see a way.]

...And then we get into "endometrial cancer" (which is highly unlikely because I'm 30 years too young for it), and more miscarriages and stuff.

My mother suggested the fibroids as the most likely possibility for my experiencing nasty pelvic pain, as they apparently run in our family. (On her side, which is nearly always what I mean when I say "our family," as much of my father's side is out of communication or dead.)

Since WebMD claims that a quarter of female-bodied folk are supposed to have fibroids, that may very well be. But since they're apparently supposed to be painless unless they grow very large, I'm not entirely convinced.

I suggested that perhaps endometriosis is the problem. Women in our family also have a tendency to develop a tilted uterus - something endometriosis can evidently lead to. Since the only certain way to know if you have it is via laparoscopy (something I'm sure none of the women in my family have had), I told Mom that it's possible it runs in our family, and no one knows.

She just shrugged and suggested I bring it up with Dr. H when I go for my next physical.

Maybe all of that speculation was merely timely, or maybe my renewed interest in researching it was mildly prophetic, but several days later - this time four days AFTER the start of my period -

It happened AGAIN.

It was a Friday, and I'm pretty sure I had the Weekly class, if it wasn't a production day. I set my alarm the night before with full intentions of getting up.

I didn't. When Mom came and banged on my bedroom door and demanded to know if I was going to school or what, I shouted back, "FUCK NO."

"Why. Not." It wasn't so much a question as a judgment; it's the tone she's taken to using when she suspects I'm shirking.

"Because I'm sick," I remember snapping back, although I don't recall why I said it. Maybe I had a sore throat, but I don't know; the decision that I was sick was made in sleep.

Mom sighed and went away. I dropped off again.

I woke around eleven. I don't know if I realized right away that It was happening again, but I definitely knew one thing:

I needed to get to the bathroom, change tampons, swallow some painkillers, and possibly find the heating pad my mother took back from me the last time she was on the rag. And I had to do it all FAST, because I had a time window of perhaps ten minutes before I was incapacitated.

I got down out of bed (f*cking loft bed - I like it most days, but if you've got nearly any physical issue, it's not exactly at the height of accessibility), left my room and staggered down the hall to the bathroom. As I did, I mentally scanned the house for my mother, but I couldn't hear her moving around anywhere. I wasn't sure if she'd told me that she was going out or not.

One really good thing about my period at that moment is that the worst of it is over in two days...three at the most. I say this was a really good thing because removing things brought me to the point of nearly blacking out: I did a graceless dive onto the floor so that I didn't smack my head on the side of the bathtub if I did lose consciousness, and send myself to the hospital with a concussion. (Boy, that would be an interesting injury to explain.) But at least I wasn't bleeding everywhere; and I decided that since putting in a new tampon was probably out of the question, a liner would probably be fine anyway.

I ended up exiting the bathroom crawling, since walking was out by then. I reflected that this meant I was doing better than the last time this happened, since the last time I wasn't able to crawl. Long-term improvement?

I was fairly sure by this point that my mother wasn't home, since she would have made an appearance as soon as she realized I was finally up. Which was unfortunate; I was waffling on whether or not I should call 911. Since the last time it'd been this bad I hadn't died, I wasn't overly inclined to; but technically, I figured I should probably consider this episode to be an emergency. The main problem was just that all the phones were one or more levels down (is there an echo in here?) and if no one else was home to help me, I'd have to make it down at least one level to call 911 myself.

Which sorta wasn't really happening.

I was keeping all my bottles of meds and supplements on a couple of free shelves of my CD tower just inside my bedroom door; recently though, they've migrated to the second-bottom shelf of my bookcase. Which was actually a stroke of good fortune, because the CD tower corner of my room is pretty dark (the loft bed blocks the light to it), and the latest bottle of Advil was in clearer sight on the bookcase shelf. Plus, I had a bottle of water sitting on that shelf. Somebody up there chose to like me that day.

Standing up made my vision start to black out again, so I popped lids and started swallowing. I took two Liqui-Gels, waffled, took one more, waffled...and by then was unable to see, so I took a fourth, dropped the pill bottle and took the water bottle and made it back out into the hall before I dropped. (Fainting in my disaster of a bedroom would be just as bad an idea as passing out in or beside a bathtub.)

When I opened my eyes again, all four of my kitties were milling around my head and meowing anxiously. I had to reflect that it was awfully sweet of them to be concerned, even if they couldn't ring my mom's cell and tell her to get her butt home to her half-dying son.

I was also just clear-headed enough to suddenly remember that I have a couple of Tylenol 3s lying around (a lil' birdie slipped 'em to me), and I mentally kicked myself for not taking one of THOSE instead of the Advil. But I sure as hell couldn't take both.

Eventually, I crawled into my mother's room and located the heating pad already plugged in beside the bed, so I dropped the water bottle beside the bed, crawled in and turned it on. I didn't have the energy to take it back to my room, so I just stayed in her bed until the Advil and the heating pad finally did enough that I could drop off.

Mom found me when she got home a few hours later - her entrance to the room was what woke me up. She was understandably surprised and puzzled (and a bit agitated) to find me in HER bed, until I explained, "This was as far as I could get."

She was pretty annoyed that I then got up to go to work, but just like the last time this happened, I was perfectly fine when I woke up.

Mom has this odd belief that if you start off the day too ill to follow through on your usual activities and responsibilities, then you are too ill to do so for the rest of the day, regardless of whether or not the internal weather improves. If the day starts with rain, then the entire day is canceled due to rain; otherwise, you should have just slogged out in a raincoat, you shirker.

My personal belief is that if the sun breaks through, not going out is the true shirking of one's duties, since you ought to always take advantage of times when the weather is clear.

We fight over this on a regular basis, and we certainly fought that afternoon over whether or not I would work in the evening. But I went, because she no longer decides where I go during the day. (Occasionally, I'm still struck by that fact, and how we transitioned into a household of adults living together rather than one adult and two children without a single announcement to mark the change.)

Now I'm stuck with the nervous fear of this happening again...somewhere in public, maybe. For the first week or so after that last period ended, I popped an Advil every time I felt so much as a twinge of pain from that general area.

I'm also freaked out because I got spot bleeding five days after it ended, and that has NEVER happened to me before, and I've been bleeding since a few months after my 12th birthday.

Sooo I'll be mentioning this all to Dr. H, and asking if there's something I can take (birth control pills, maybe) that'll control it. If this is the kind of thing that's only going to show up every SEVEN YEARS or so, then I suppose it doesn't really matter, but now I'm paranoid.

I have a doc appointment on Friday, but since that's going to be a script refill day, along with going over some test results, I probably won't have time to talk about it. I really need to make an appointment for a full checkup anyway; she asked me to after I mentioned losing a bunch of weight over Christmas for no apparent reason.

Oh, and I really should see a dentist as well.

Lala. *makes mental notes*

OH GOD, I need to go to bed. I have stuff to do tomorrow I need to be up for.

storytime, health, pain, tmi

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