Wex vs the virus, round 2

[drwex]

Or, "Why do you have 2.5lb of barium in your intestines?"

Short form: I'm OK. At home today so I can be close to a bathroom if needed, and can contemplate solid food. Like, maybe toast. Maybe.

Long form...

You may recall that a week ago Saturday I had a brief and painful encounter with a norovirus. Lots of muscle pains, fever spikes, bowel troubles. Bad news. Slowly got better through the week. Then suddenly I get another of those "wake up NOW!" messages from the body at 6A on Sunday. This is another intestinal thing, but not like the last one.

This one seems to be an overlay of bad allergic reaction (hands swelling, random body itches, lots of mucus) with intestinal upsets. I knock myself out with some Benadryl and figure I'll get over it, but when I wake up around noon it's pretty clear that not only am I not over it, things are rapidly getting worse. Particularly muscular cramps.

When the cramps get sufficiently bad that I can't move, Pygment decides I should go to the ER, I've been reluctant to go because the last couple times I went involved me sitting around uncomfortable and bored waiting for someone to look at me. Eventually I got bored enough to call a taxi to take me home.

In hopes of a better experience we asked the ambulance to take me to Winchester, which gets high marks for the whole experience. Good people, reasonably professional, willing to answer questions and deal with me changing my mind about things like pain meds (no, I don't want them when the pain is at 3-4 on the 1-10 scale. When it shoots up to 8-9 about 3 minutes later yes, I do want pain meds).

Apparently, the cure for what ails me involves a bumpy ambulance ride, followed by intense pain, screaming cramps and eventual vomiting. I will say that outright screaming in an ER is one way to get peoples' focused attention, especially when it's pretty clearly severe pain and not just whinging for priority. Also, having a recurrence of the allergic reaction in front of the doc is a good way to convince her you weren't hallucinating the first one.

Once again the Benadryl knocked me out - Pygment says they came and did a BP/vitals check and I slept through it. I woke up feeling mostly better and chatted with the doc. She noted I had a lot of abdominal tenderness and I'm at the age where my father first started having gall bladder problems. Since my EKG looked normal she scheduled me for an X-ray and CT scan to get a good picture of the lower insides. The first was easy - they brought the machine to me, I sat up and zip zap done. The CT... not so much.

First, there's the barium drink. I get to drink a pound of apple-flavored whipped chalk. Honestly the taste wasn't that bad, but since I'd had nothing to eat or drink for some hours it was... an interesting experience. Then I got to drink ANOTHER one, over the next hour and a half. Meanwhile I'm feeling bored and gross. I want to go home and shower. This stuff is like fine-grain lead shot gurgling around in my guts. Finally, after two and half hours of this I get called down for the CT, before which they want me to drink ANOTHER 10oz of the stuff. It really does taste better cold, I'll give them that.

Finally, the CT itself takes about five minutes. The technology has advanced a lot and the tech told me even this machine is now considered slow and out of date. Ain't science great! Magic barium-ball says "All results negative." So, no gall bladder issues, no diverticulitis, no ulcer, no perforations. Never was happier to have all negatives on my report card.

Eventually, eight-plus hours after I arrived, Pygment gets to take me home. Yay, home, shower, soup.


I managed a good sleep last night and I feel worlds better today. I'm contemplating solid food now, though I haven't made any commitments. The biggest question, which the doc really couldn't tell me, was why the symptoms this time around were so radically different than the last bout. If I really needed to know they might be able to get a stool sample and culture something or other but.. meh. She wrote me a scrip for Cipro, which is what I used last time to kill off the infection. Once my digestion is even halfway back to normal I'll start on that. Meanwhile, the tech did warn me that this stuff "tends to go right through you." Yep, that it does...

As an aside: apologies to people whose events I missed on Saturday. I was feeling run down and not in a party mood. In retrospect I was almost certainly contagious so while missing parties is suckfull, giving this virus to someone else would be REALLY the pits. I take some consolation from that.

Comments

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Ugh, how wretched. You've had weird allergic reactions resulting in ER visits in the past, too, as I recall. Bad enough on their own, but in conjunction with the rest of it? Owwww. I'm glad you're recovering. And yeah, barium going through the GI tract is really nasty. Blech.

[drwex]

Indeed, this felt a lot like the systemic allergic reactions I had in '01 and '02. At that time, the ER doc who evaluated me pointed out that as a person who has a lot of environmental allergies my body is "primed" for this kind of thing. Still no idea what triggered it this time.