(no subject)
On Tuesday morning, I woke up with a very unsettled stomach and threw up in the bathroom. I felt a little better after, but went back to bed. I had slept on the couch the night before because my kidney was still very sore and the couch was the only place I could get comfortable. My Mom called my kidney doctor, and he said that he felt that the pain and nausea I was experiencing was completely unrelated the biopsy, but for me to take Tylenol to help with the pain. After a few hours, the pain was still there but my stomach felt better, so I ate some lunch. Immediately after consumption, I threw up that and all of the water that I had drank previously until I couldn't throw up anything else besides bile. I went to lay back down on the couch, hoping that that was the last time I would throw up, but I was mistaken. I continued to throw up absolutely everything that went into my body, including Pedialyte and Peptobismol. My Mom called my actual doctor, who wasn't in her office anymore, so she called my kidney doctor again. She told him about how I couldn't keep any food down and how the pain was still there, and he told her to bring me to the emergency room immediately because he was on-call and wanted to examine me.
We arrived at the emergency room around 6:30 at night, and didn't get seen by a doctor until about 9:30. A medical student asked me all of the questions pertaining to my ailment and questions about my medical history. He also did a small examination of my stomach and then relayed all of the information to the doctor in charge. Once they placed me in a room, they wanted to do an ultrasound on my kidneys. The ultrasounds they use in the ER, however, aren't as exact as the ones done by the people that specialize in ultrasounds in the ultrasound department. The doctor said she couldn't find any excess fluid anywhere, but wanted to give me CT scan to be sure. She went to put the order in around 10:30, and a nurse came in to give me an IV. She placed the iv in my right arm and literally infiltrated the vein and made my arm shake uncontrollably and go numb. Another nurse had to come in and give me an iv in my other arm and take out the one that the other woman had messed up on. They gave me anti-nausea medicine through my iv, though, in the meantime, I had stopped vomiting. Then we had to sit and wait. It wasn't until 3:30 in the morning when the doctor came in and said I could finally have the CT scan done. I didn't have to ingest the medicine that they need you to have in your body because of the fact that I was throwing up all day, so I was lucky and had it put through my iv. The medicine they use literally makes you feel like your body is on fire, but luckily, the scan didn't take anymore than 10 minutes. I was told that I would be able to eat something when the results of that were back, so I was happy about that. The results came back not too long later, and they showed that my kidney was bleeding. They didn't let me eat or drink anything because of this because they weren't sure which test they were going to have to do next. So they gave me some medicine to hopefully stop the bleeding, and we waited.
Around 7 AM Wednesday morning, a doctor came in and started to explain to use what he had discussed with my kidney doctor. He said that they wanted to give me another ultrasound to see if I was indeed still bleeding and to get a better idea of where the blood was coming from. He also said I couldn't eat or drink anything until this was done. Around 9 am, a nurse came in with a glass of water and told me that I had to drink it until my bladder became full for the ultrasound, but that I couldn't go to the bathroom. I drank it, and about an hour later was taken for the ultrasound. The person in charge of the ultrasound was the person who did the ultrasound as I had a biopsy last week and he remembered who I was. He took 56 pictures of my kidney and had them sent to be examined. I was able to go back to my room after, but had to wait to be told what to do next. Another medical student came in and said that they still found blood around my kidneys, and that I wasn't going to be able to eat because they had to do a 'procedure' on me to make the vessel stop bleeding. The procedure was supposed to go like this: They would make an incision on my groin and run a dye through the veins there. By using a small camera, they would able to see if the dye spilled out of the veins or out of my kidney, and would be able to determine what vessels were bleeding. If a vessel was bleeding, they would have to manually put a stop to it. In the meantime, so more medical students came in and wanted to give me another ultrasound, I'm not really sure why, and they said that they didn't see any excess fluids around my kidney. After that, I waited until about 2 PM to get the procedure done. I was literally freaking out because they didn't want to put me to sleep, so I started crying. I didn't want to be awake to feel them prodding around my insides. Luckily, the medication they gave me left me heavily sedated and I started tripping out and lost my sense of reality, so I was hardly aware of what was going on. Evidently they didn't find any bleeding vessels, so it had clotted up by itself, so they just had to bandage me up and send me back to my room for recovery. I was required to lay completely flat for 4 hours, which made my back extremely sore. Because I was heavily sedated, my stomach felt a little nauseous and I was extremely tired. I was told that I could potentially leave that night if I didn't throw up or if the place they worked on wasn't bleeding. Luckily, neither of those things happened, so I was discharged at around 9:30 PM and could finally go home. The first thing I did when I went home was, as you could have guessed, EAT!
Now, I have to be on bedrest for another 24 hours. I basically can't do any heavy lifting or run or anything for a month. I'm still pretty sore, but not as badly as before. A nurse told me that my kidney was definitely going to be sore for a while because it was bruised, and bruises usually take a while to heal. My kidney doctor took me off of the iron supplements that he prescribed because he felt that they were too strong for my body. I missed all of the things that my friends were doing together on Tuesday and Wednesday, and am going to miss another party that Kalen is going to have on Friday because it would obviously be stupid of me to drink when alcohol is a blood thinner and one of my organs was bleeding. I'm pretty bummed about this because obviously while everyone is out having fun, I'm going to be stuck at my house doing absolutely nothing during my last week home. Awesome.
Oh, and pertaining to my follow-up appointment on Monday... I have a kidney disease called FSGS. It's the same disease that Peter has, just not far along in progress. They haven't gotten all of the results back yet, because they sent my biopsy out for a second opinion, so they don't know which type of the disease that I have. But, evidently 40% of people with this disease experience kidney failure in their lifetime, and the majority of the people with this disease usually end up needing a kidney transplant, so it is definitely serious. A smaller amount of people can see this disease curing itself, but as of right now, there is no cure for this disease. If they see that my situation gets worse, they are going to put me on steroids because of it. But as of right now, I need to continue to take blood pressure and cholesterol medications for the rest of my life.