I AM SO BEHIND!  Here is how this past week went...

Thursday (10/18) - In the middle of my International Relations class I about pass out.  I start getting all fuzzy and the room starts spinng and I feel like I am going to throw up.  I grab my cell phone and nothing else, and make a quick exit.  For the past 8 days I have been getting 3-4 times as much fluid out of my bulb thing than I am supposed to and I have been queasy almost non-stop, making eating and drinking really hard.  I've felt sluggish for days, but finally I start to feel like things are getting life threatening.  I call La Crosse to talk to the surgery clinic nurses and they want me to go to the ER.  I don't have a car so instead I find a quiet room, eat a cheese stick, drink some water and try to calm down.  After my other class let out I went back to the room and got my stuff.  I managed to hold it together for one more hour for my last class of the day, but as I rode to my mom's house for fall break with a friend I felt like I was dying.  I couldn't quite breathe as deep as I wanted or get the room to stop spinning.  At my mom's house I curl up in a corner on the couch and just try to keep breathing and drinking.  Dr. Baker's office left a message on my cell phone in the mean time, telling me they want me to come in at 10 the next day for a tube check because something is definately wrong.

Friday (10/19) - Emergency Trip to La Crosse to re-position my tube, which had migrated out of my stomach (after losing 13 pounds in 9 days unintentionally).  I felt better almost as soon as they moved the tube. 

Saturday (10/20) - Do 6 hours of service learning for my Adolescent Psych class, still feeling good.

Sunday (10/21) - Church and recover at my mom's house (and gain 2 pounds intentionally)

Monday (10/22) - Follow-up appointment with Dr. Baker in La Crosse.  All looks good until Kyle and I start home.  All of a sudden my bulb thing at the end of my tube starts filling up quickly again, a sign that the tube has migrated.  I let it go , hoping it is just a fluke.

Tuesday (10/23) - I go to campus and start feeling really drained (pun unintentional) and nauseous again.  I have trouble keeping food down and I'm losing 100 cc's of fluid every 20 minutes.  I call La Crosse and am instructed to go get x-rays at Plattville's hospital (they'll send orders) to check my tube position.  After frantically (unsuccessfully) trying to get a hold of Kyle, he finally answers his phone and I get to the hospital where po-dunk P-ville doesn't even have a radiologist on staff.  They technician who took the xray has ME come look at it to see if I can tell if the tube is out of place.  DUH.  Xrays just show BONE and METAL not organs, how in the world am I supposed to know?  What I do notice is the IUD I had inserted back in March is UPSIDE DOWN!  GREAT.  I call La Crosse and let them know this isn't going to be good enough, and they agree and tell me to get there ASAP.  Kyle and I make the 3 hour drive (having to stop frequently to empty my bulb).  We get to the ER where a rush assures I have lots of time to worry about how many days it has been since I shaved my legs and  the fact that it's laundry day so I'm wearing granny panties and now the stereotypically cute doctors-in-training are going to know.  Not only that but they are sure to ask about my recent bowel movements and if I'm passing gas just to make my mortification complete.  I am a professional patient and so I hardly flinch anymore when a tech draws blood or intserts an IV.  This IV insertion was rougher than normal (as the bruise on my hand will testify to) and watching ended up being too much for Kyle so he had to excuse himself.  Xrays show the tube has definately moved out of my stomach, but none of the doctors on staff can move it until morning.  Well, they could take it out (heck, I could take it out - and have taken them out before) but not put a new one in so I'm stuck.  They can't send me home like this so I'm admitted.  

Wednesday (10/24) - I have now missed 3 days of school.  In the hospital I am happily hydrated, but kept NPO (no food) as a precaution.  At 4am my tube is clamped.  Dr. Baker wants to see if we can get me really filled up with fluid and do a CT scan to check, one last time, for SMA syndrome.  Within 10 minutes of being clamped I feel like a water balloon.  I'm given dramamine and sent back to sleep.  Later in the morning I ask for more anti-nausea drugs and am given Reglen aka heroine.  It makes me jittery like you wouldn't believe.  At least it wasn't droperidal which makes me hallucinate.  The CT scan happens at about 10:30 (only an hour and a half after it was scheduled for) and is CONCLUSIVE.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we got a CONCLUSIVE test out of me!  I HAVE SMA SYNDROME!  FOR SURE!  Now, I thank God for Dr. Baker listening to his gut and waiting to remove the excluded stomach because if he would have removed the stomach I could have died.  The SMA syndrome means I have fluid build up in the upper limb of the duodenum, and when the pressure gets to be too much the fluid refluxes into the excluded stomach, but without an excluded stomach there to collect excess fluid the duodenum could burst and that would be fatal.  So yes, Dr. Baker is the right man for this job.  I hang out in my room, still NPO, until close to 4:30 when I am discharged.  I have to come back tomorrow to get a new tube because all the radiologists are sick of my ugly mug (jk - really the radiologists were just booked solid).  So my grandpa picked me up and took me home, where I attend church and try to eat and drink (they told me to eat and drink) through the nausea and pain before falling dead asleep from anti-nausea meds.

Thursday (10/25) - My grandparents (these people rock) take me back up to La Crosse.  Dr. Baker removed my old tube and reinserted a new one himself.  This one is held in place by a balloon and it sits a lot shallower in the stomach so it shouldn't move.  It is really uncomfortable and it doesn't drain as well as the other one so I am back on daily pain meds and anti-nausea meds until my surgery which will be the day before Thanksgiving.  At home I try to get used to the new tube which is a lot longer than the old one, and eat and drink through the pain.  I have now missed 4 days of school and am supposed to take midterms tomorrow.  I e-mail and call my merciful professors and get extensions for the tests.  

Friday (10/26) - I stay at my mom's house and recover from my hospital adventures.  Hospital stays are never as restful as you think they should be.  I mean how much sleep/rest can you possibly get with nurses coming in to check your vitals every half and hour?  Then I rode along with my older sister to pick up my nephew from a visit with his dad.  I've managed to put back on 4 of the 13 pounds I lost - which we guess were mostly fluid anyway.  I hate my new tube.  The balloon puts pressure on the inside of my stomach and that is NOT PLEASANT at all.  It basically means sleeping lying down is out of the question.  Like I said before it also doesn't drain as well as the other tube so I spend a lot of time managing pain with serious drugs that I need to be done with.  But, at least I am closer to surgery and FINALITY and I probably won't die.  On that positive note, my dog thinks I am the coolest (when I'm not feeling well she turns into my shadow and so I've spent the past 30 hours reassuring her that I am okay with lots of scratches behind her ears) and my nephew looked at me and with all sincerity and said "Thank you uncle Amy" and later lovingly called me "My aunt Amy" while trying to force feed me funyuns.  That right there will keep me smiling for days.

I'm devoting Saturday to studying for midterms and Sunday to my grandpa Robertson's retirement.  He is a pastor and Sunday is his last Sunday in the pulpit before he retires.  It is going to be a beautiful service and a lot of my family is here to attend it.  Monday it is back to school - wish me luck!  I'm a week behind so it is going to be hard to catch up but I sure am going to do everything I can to get there.

Okay, so I doctor-ed up a diagram of bypass to kind of make sense of this whole thing.  The Blue line is the Superior Mesenteric Artery (SMA) that crosses over the duodenum and potentially chokes it off -what I wasn't able to draw on is the fact that the pancreus and the liver are right by the duodenum - and major important things (this is where my biology illeteracy shows) empty necessary fluids into the duodenum before it is crossed by the SMA.  If my doc removed the excluded stomach there would be a dead end of intestine BEFORE it hits the SMA artery  - so if the SMA is really choking off the duodenum and fluid empties into the duodenum and isn't able to move through due to the SMA the staple line could blow - causing septic and all kinds of trouble.  Not cool.  So before we go removing stomachs we're going to bypass the SMA artery with the pink line of intestine taken from further down the line.  That way the fluid can bypass the SMA and not get built up in the duodenum (and now, when it gets really backed up fluid refluxes into the stomach).  If this bypass procedure doesn't work my surgeon will go back in and remove the stomach and we won't have to worry about fluid getting trapped by the SMA because the potential blockage will have been bypassed.

I hope that makes sense!

And for the record I have a tentative surgery date of November 16th.  YAY!  That is a good start.

I have been nauseous almost non-stop since Monday.  I think my excluded stomach wants me to throw up but like I said before it doesn't work.  About 10 minutes ago I was walking in to the student center on my college campus after spending close to half and hour hunting for a parking spot and my bulb thing at the end of my tube got so full it just popped open and started leaking bile everywhere.  GROSS.  But way worse than that is feeling sick to my stomach all day every day.  Someone make it stop.  I want to be done now. 

 It was really hard to take at first but I've gotten closer to being over it as hours have passed by.  When I'm not as sensitive about it I will tell you what happened but for now know that I just had some minor things to change and will re-submit TOMORROW already.  There are two kinds of "fail" - there is "Tweak these few things and it'll be fine" and "How in the world were you admitted to college with writing/organizational skills like this?"  The latter kind of failing requires a mandatory 2 hour training session.  Thankfully mine was the first kind of failing that just requires me to fix a few things and then present my re-vamped portfolio to one of the Introduction to Education professors.  Since there really isn't that much for me to do I'm going to get that out of the way tomorrow.  *sigh* at least it is almost over, right?

And for the rest of my day...I feel so sick.  I am constantly nauseous.  I don't know what is going on.  I think it is the drainage from this cold causing my excluded stomach to go hay wire, but I don't know that for sure.  I want to throw up but I can't really throw up from my excluded stomach since, well, it is excluded.  So instead I just walk around dry heaving occasionally.  Not fun.  All the more reason to get to the bottom of this stomach thing.

I feel ICKY!  Very, very icky.  I've had this cold for a while now and all the drainage is filling up my pouch and making my excluded stomach work really hard to make extra juices since it still thinks it is digesting.  Silly excluded stomach.  Anyway, the drain bulb thing has been filling up every 45 minutes now instead of every 75.  Grrreat. Which means I run to the bathroom a lot.  If I don't empty it RIGHT AWAY I get "the pain" and if I wait too long I start to dry heave.  The excluded stomach might not be able to perform regular contractions to push digestive cocktails out the bottom of it but apparently it can still make me dry heave.  Grrreat again.  Right when I got home from school (around 10:30pm) I think it must have been too long and I had to go try to puke for a while.  Not intentionally, but because my excluded stomach was unhappy.  This is not cool.  I have A LOT going on.  So much in fact that I spaced out about a group project meeting I was supposed to go to at 11 today (we had to present at 2pm).  Kick me!  Ugh.  I was working on my Level One Portfolio for admission to the School of Education and on re-proofing an article of mine for the paper and on an outline for a research paper I have to hand in on Thursday.  The group thing just completely fell off my radar.  We still pulled it off but I think my group is mad at me and I can't say I blame them.  Anyway, if you don't hear from me tomorrow it is because I am manically depressed over failing my Level One Portfolio Assessment/Interview.  Let's hope that doesn't happen.  Now I need to go iron my outfit for tomorrow and get some sleep (in that order).  The portfolio is looking good and if I want to be looking good too I need to get some sleep. 

On 10/11/2007

Make that 800cc's from around 2:30pm this afternoon to 1400+cc's total so far today as of 8:45pm.  Yeah, that's a lot of fluid considering before today I averaged 250-300cc's per day. 

9:20pm - 1500 cc's

10:30pm - 1650 cc's

11:00pm - 1725 cc's

On 10/12/2007

And as of today at around 8:15 the grand total fluid out put is sitting at 1300 cc's with me having to empty the 100 cc rubber baggie thing about every 75 minutes.  Once, earlier today, I let it go for close to 2 hours because I wasn't paying attention, then I started to have "the pain" and I looked down and it was completely full.  I went to the bathroom and emptied it then put the suction back on (basically you squish the baggie thing and put the plug back in to make it suck) and it filled up again almost imediately.  Nice.  So reassuring

Today was strange.  Normally from my tube I get about 300cc of fluid a day (from when I wake up to when I go to bed) and the fluid ranges from light apple juice color/consistency to dark brown/burgandy color to pea soup color/consistency.  Well today it all looks like snot and from 8 this morning until now (around 2:30) there has been 800cc's of it.  YIKES.  

That seemed strange so I called my surgeon's office.  Not like there is ever anyone there to answer the phone - but at least I called and left a message.  Now I am also still waiting to hear when my surgery date will be to remove the excluded stomach (yes, STILL waiting).  I had called earlier in the week about that but no one has gotten back to me.  The last time I talked to Dr. Baker he told me, and this is almost word for word, "You will have surgery to remove your excluded stomach by early November".  

So Dr. Baker himself called me back.  I told him the deal - about the extra goo today and all - and he tells me that it might be because I have a cold right now but he's not sure but I shouldn't worry .  Then, before I even ask about when the surgery will be he tells me "go back on the medication I was having you take and we'll see how that works for you.  Then  we'll put a new, less pronounced, tube in that you can just push a button to vent."  RIGHT.  That sounds GREAT!  I THOUGHT WE WERE DONE WITH THIS!

I want to cry but I can't because I have class!  He called be right before a class started so I didn't have time to argue and I had to suck it up and move on.  I should have argued but I lost my nerve - I had people waiting for me (we were working on a group project today), I was in the hallway where everyone can hear me and I just am not good at arguing with Dr. Baker.  The front desk is supposed to be calling me here soon to set up my next appointment to check on things. WTF!  I don't want to check on things!  That's all we've been doing is "checking on things" for months now!  UGH!

Then again I don't want them to remove the stomach if it isn't the right thing to do...  I know I'm not a doctor but at this point the "doctors" don't really know what to do either.  I'm just feeling let down again.  They keep giving me an end point - a finish line - and knowing it will be just a little while longer gives me the stamina to keep running but the finish line keeps getting pushed further and further away until now I can't even see it anymore.  There is no end in sight.

I attempted to go to 2nd St. this past Saturday night.  2nd St. is the "bar street" in Platteville and for some reason I got it in my head that it would be loads of fun to get some people together and head down to take part in the homecoming revelry.  What I had pictured and what actually happened were worlds apart.  What I pictured was a boistorous night of conversation, a couple drinks and companionship.  What happened was a bunch of skanky girls and obnoxious guys practicing strange mating rituals to deafening music.  What is wrong with kids today?  I don't get it.

Part of me is sad that I "don't get it".  I just felt old and out of place.  I am not your typical college student seeing as Saturday night was my first night "going out".  I went to a club a couple years ago with some girl friends of mine but it was a 18-20 club and there was no drinking involved.  I also felt awkward and out of place there, but at least I had fun.  

Why did I feel awkward?  Well, there are a couple of reasons.  First, I don't like people who make"getting wasted" a recreational activity.  I am not anti-alcohol for people who are old enough and mature enough to handle it, however I am anti-stupidity.  Drunk girls are easy targets and drunk guys are morons (as are drunk girls, drunk guys are harder targets though).  Second, I am anti-whore.  Girls who wear short mini-skirts and tops leaving NOTHING to the imagination are doing so either because they don't know better, because they think their only attributes worth noting are physical or because they have no self worth.  I feel sorry for them at the same time I am really turned off.  I am not against girls wearing pretty or even slightly suggestive clothes.  There are just a couple fine lines that get crossed (like the butt crack showing - definately a line not to be crossed).  Third problem with Saturday night - some girl asked my husband (while I wasn't around) if she could touch his nipples.  WTF?  If I would have been there I would have spanked her, washed her mouth out and sent her home to her mother.  Even if he weren't my husband what sense in her head (or lack of sense) made her think it was acceptable to ask some strange man such a thing?  She was needless to say very drunk and Kyle told her she couldn't (which didn't stop her from trying) but what if instead of Kyle she had asked that to some jerk with no morals?  Or even better, how would she have responded if some jerk asked her the same question?  If the gender roles in that situation would have been reversed there would be a sexual harassment lawsuit in the works.  It seems like complete idiocy.

But part of me is still sad that I "don't get it".  I am sad about the stupid things I will never say after too many drinks I shouldn't have had.  I regret the drunk dialing I'll never do and hurtful things I'll never say as a result of shots I should have turned down.  I mourn the one-night stand's I'll never have and for lack of them the STD's I'll never contract and the unplanned pregnancies that will never result not to mention the loss of emotional damage I'll never do to myself.  These tears I shed for the "What did I do?" mornings that I will never experience after long nights of brain-damaging over indulgence.  Oh hangovers I will never have, today I cry for you!

Thanks for letting me get that out of my system.

*sigh* It's close to over but not close enough!  Last night was one of the first nights since this disaster started that I was able to sleep in the bed with my husband all night.  Since June I would start out in the bed with him sometimes but almost always I would end up moving to the chair or to sitting up on the couch because it hurts to lay down.  First "the pain" was provoked by laying down and then once the tube was inserted laying down has been uncomfortable.  Tonight there is no such luck.  I started out laying in the bed but only made it an hour and a half before discomfort drove me out (and I was getting tired of thrashing and keeping Kyle awake).  

I am starting to wonder how it feels to be pain-neutral.  Ya know, no pain, no discomfort, no pain med high, just neutral.  I don't need the pain med high.  The pain med high scares me because I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't like the "mellow" almost "euphoric" way it makes me feel.  That is not to say I go out of my way to take it when I don't need it, however I have the urge to occasionally and that is not cool at all.  So tonight I'm trying to go without just to prove that I can.  I took 2 tylenol and a benadryl (I've got the sniffles from allergies) hoping that'll be enough.

Tomorrow is going to be a LONG day if I don't get some sleep here soon.  But for some reason my heart is pounding and I am really warm, not to mention in pain.  Argh.  This can not be over soon enough!
____________________________________________________

Now I can explain the rapid heart beat and heat.  My body wanted to ralph.  My body is silly because we never are productive at getting anything UP anymore by ralphing, but it sure does put forth an honest effort.  Whenever I throw-up it is more like a lot of dry heaving, burping and spitting.  Why my body felt the need to ralph is beyond me but I sure hope it is satisfied so I can get some sleep.  I have to drive my husband to work at 7am tomorrow and then I have to work myself at 10.  I'm doing product demonstrations again when I can.  My first day back on the job was today and everything went smoothly (except for a malfunctioning pizza oven that cooked things unevenly) and now I have that same product to demo tomorrow.  On Sunday I'm passing out locally produced cheese, that oughta be fun.  Okay, I'm feeling better - at least there is no sweating and my heart beat feels normal - so I'm going to try to sleep.  I'll let you know how that goes! 

Howdy,

I've been MIA on OH for a f ew days.  Thankfully that is not because I am curled up in a ball somewhere, instead it is because I am just REALLY busy.  I haven't heard from my surgeon about when my surgery to remove my stomach is going to be - he said at the latest it will be early November - but if I don't hear from him by Wednesday I'll call up there.  In the mean time I was at my mom's house (with only dial-up internet) over Friday and the weekend then Monday I had a quiz and an exam.  I have LOTS of reading to do and I'm starting to fall behind (think upwards of 100 pages most nights) so it is time for me to get my butt in gear.  I have had some painful hours (mostly after days I over-do it) and I've got the sniffles but I really can't complain.  Oh, and I've got to be careful not to slip back into becoming a chocolate fiend.  I crave it like crazy!  I got some peanut M&M's because I'm nuts (hee hee) and that just started me down the wrong path.  The M&M's are gone now so hopefully I'll be able to snap out of it.  And now I'm off to finish getting ready for classes today...I will try to stop by the boards later tonight!