My Hospital Stay (Under the Cut for Those Who Don't Want to Know)
Monday morning.
Still feeling somewhat under the weather. As noted in yesterday's early evening journal entry, I ran the Sunday game of the Primeval RPG on the group, and had a relatively good day with my abdomen and bowels. I watched a bit of tv after my liquid supper, and seem to have slept a good night's sleep (for a change).
I decided this morning that I wasn't going in to work, and called in to let them know and try to work from home today, still sticking for a while more to the liquid diet. We'll see how the plan goes.
After much thought, I've decided not to do a full post about my hospital stay on Friday night/Saturday morning as noted in this entry. I'll just offer some tidbits here as follows.
I started having the same abdominal pain and cramps on Friday evening around 9:00 pm as noted in this journal entry, and by around 1:00 am I decided that it was time to go to the hospital. Which is what I did.
I got to the hospital around 1:35 am, and was told the wait would be around 4 hours. The pain remained severe on and off during the wait, and I finally saw a doctor around 6:30 am. Because I'm diabetic, they started off with some physical examinations, probing the whole abdomen, which was sore and tender to the touch everywhere, and then did blood tests (putting in the IV line stuff, which I hate, as my arm and hand don't respond well to them), and then sent me for a chest x-ray (!!) before finally deciding to do an abdominal CT scan. Since the problems involved my abdomen, they wouldn't let me drink anything and there was no food allowed of course. I did get a bag of saline sometime on Saturday morning, well before the CT scan, iirc, so I was feeling pretty dehydrated of course.
For the entire time I've been sick, I've had running diarrhea, and even without too much food the last few days, I was still producing some of that. I had two bowel movements (if you can call them that) during the stay in the hospital, and there was a bit of blood in two of them that had me alarmed, but the nurses didn't seem to think it was unusual, though they noted this in the chart. The doctor who came on at the shift change at 7:00 am Saturday did a Digital Rectal Exam (DRE) around 11:00 am, and said that I had a slightly enlarged prostate (which I already knew about), and a small tear in the wall of my anal canal (or whatever, I forget the exact terms he used), but that wasn't a surprise given how much diarrhea I've had the past week or so.
He decided to do a ketoacidosis test on me, and so they took care of that. The test on that came back negative, thank goodness. Finally, the doctor and whoever he consulted said that I would be given a couple of bags of saline drip, since I was obviously quite dehydrated, and then I could go home. They believed that I might have the current gastro-intestinal virus that's going around, yadda yadda yadda, but he suggested that I get my doctor to set up a colonoscopy as it could be other things, though the CT scan ruled out a few things.
The whole time I was in the hospital, I was suffering from the abdominal pain and cramps (quite severe for the first eight hours or so, but it eased off eventually to occasional twinges). And I had one other real problem: I couldn't lie down on the damn beds in the Urgent Care rooms! These beds are like folding couches with an indentation where the fold is, and that was right on the spot where I've still got my bulging disc. The pain lying down on the bed was severe, so I had to sit in chairs after the first hour for the entire time I was there once I was in the UC area. Around two hours after the shift change occurred, the nurses saw that I wasn't on the "bed", and so sent me back to one of the actual waiting rooms in the UC area itself! So I didn't even have any personal privacy after that point, other than when I went for a couple of tests and had IVs fitted. And just for folks' amusement, when they gave me the saline bags before letting me go home, the IV drip wouldn't drip into my arm for whatever reasons, and so they had to set it on an auto pump that got it flowing into my arm. Because I was in a waiting room, and not one of the Urgent Care rooms with a bed and curtains, the noise of the auto pump drove the rest of the people who were there crazy. I didn't actually care by then, as I wasn't feeling all that charitable.
That about sums things up on the hospital visit front. I feel stressed and upset just thinking about it. So, 'nuff said.
Still feeling somewhat under the weather. As noted in yesterday's early evening journal entry, I ran the Sunday game of the Primeval RPG on the group, and had a relatively good day with my abdomen and bowels. I watched a bit of tv after my liquid supper, and seem to have slept a good night's sleep (for a change).
I decided this morning that I wasn't going in to work, and called in to let them know and try to work from home today, still sticking for a while more to the liquid diet. We'll see how the plan goes.
After much thought, I've decided not to do a full post about my hospital stay on Friday night/Saturday morning as noted in this entry. I'll just offer some tidbits here as follows.
I started having the same abdominal pain and cramps on Friday evening around 9:00 pm as noted in this journal entry, and by around 1:00 am I decided that it was time to go to the hospital. Which is what I did.
I got to the hospital around 1:35 am, and was told the wait would be around 4 hours. The pain remained severe on and off during the wait, and I finally saw a doctor around 6:30 am. Because I'm diabetic, they started off with some physical examinations, probing the whole abdomen, which was sore and tender to the touch everywhere, and then did blood tests (putting in the IV line stuff, which I hate, as my arm and hand don't respond well to them), and then sent me for a chest x-ray (!!) before finally deciding to do an abdominal CT scan. Since the problems involved my abdomen, they wouldn't let me drink anything and there was no food allowed of course. I did get a bag of saline sometime on Saturday morning, well before the CT scan, iirc, so I was feeling pretty dehydrated of course.
For the entire time I've been sick, I've had running diarrhea, and even without too much food the last few days, I was still producing some of that. I had two bowel movements (if you can call them that) during the stay in the hospital, and there was a bit of blood in two of them that had me alarmed, but the nurses didn't seem to think it was unusual, though they noted this in the chart. The doctor who came on at the shift change at 7:00 am Saturday did a Digital Rectal Exam (DRE) around 11:00 am, and said that I had a slightly enlarged prostate (which I already knew about), and a small tear in the wall of my anal canal (or whatever, I forget the exact terms he used), but that wasn't a surprise given how much diarrhea I've had the past week or so.
He decided to do a ketoacidosis test on me, and so they took care of that. The test on that came back negative, thank goodness. Finally, the doctor and whoever he consulted said that I would be given a couple of bags of saline drip, since I was obviously quite dehydrated, and then I could go home. They believed that I might have the current gastro-intestinal virus that's going around, yadda yadda yadda, but he suggested that I get my doctor to set up a colonoscopy as it could be other things, though the CT scan ruled out a few things.
The whole time I was in the hospital, I was suffering from the abdominal pain and cramps (quite severe for the first eight hours or so, but it eased off eventually to occasional twinges). And I had one other real problem: I couldn't lie down on the damn beds in the Urgent Care rooms! These beds are like folding couches with an indentation where the fold is, and that was right on the spot where I've still got my bulging disc. The pain lying down on the bed was severe, so I had to sit in chairs after the first hour for the entire time I was there once I was in the UC area. Around two hours after the shift change occurred, the nurses saw that I wasn't on the "bed", and so sent me back to one of the actual waiting rooms in the UC area itself! So I didn't even have any personal privacy after that point, other than when I went for a couple of tests and had IVs fitted. And just for folks' amusement, when they gave me the saline bags before letting me go home, the IV drip wouldn't drip into my arm for whatever reasons, and so they had to set it on an auto pump that got it flowing into my arm. Because I was in a waiting room, and not one of the Urgent Care rooms with a bed and curtains, the noise of the auto pump drove the rest of the people who were there crazy. I didn't actually care by then, as I wasn't feeling all that charitable.
That about sums things up on the hospital visit front. I feel stressed and upset just thinking about it. So, 'nuff said.