In sickness and in health…
Amy and I have thoroughly tested this vow in the past 6 months (and then some!)…
It all started around Thanksgiving 2007. I got pretty sick to my stomach. Lots of severe nausea that lasted for days. Leading up to this, I had been experiencing worsening acid reflux, but I tended to it with Tums, Maalox, and Mylanta, and lots of it. Overall it was fairly manageable. But Thanksgiving seemed to change things. I went to the doctor and he gave me a month’s sample of Nexium. For the first month or so, things seemed to be getting better. After December, the free samples ran out, and my insurance wouldn’t cover a prescription for Nexium. Without insurance, a month’s supply would cost $300!!! I opted for Prilosec OTC and that worked just as well. For a couple of months, that seemed to do okay.
However, after a few months the nausea started to creep back. I kept up with my Prilosec regimen and the nausea after eating kept up. As the months went by, it go progressively worse. Around June to July (about the time Amy and I were getting married), it was getting to the point where I needed to see a doctor. With all the wedding and honeymoon and reception stuff going on, there wasn’t time for a doctor. Finally, in August, I got an appointment to see the doctor. He turned me over to a gastrointerologist. In September, I got in at the GI doc and got probed. He decided that the nausea came from my stomach not contracting to digest food properly. He gave me some meds that helped a little. After about a month, it just wasn’t doing it for me. He and my other doctor didn’t have anything for me, so I kinda took matters into my own hands.
It felt like I didn’t have enough acids in my stomach to digest food. I decided to take myself off of the proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) to get some acids back in my stomach to digest food. I armed myself with acid reducers and weened myself off the PPIs. October was a miserable month. Just about everything would trigger major acid reflux that I could taste. Fortunately, throughout November things seemed to gradually settle down. I was finally starting to return to some semblance of normal! The only thing is that it still took a while for food to digest. I usually wouldn’t get hungry again for 6-8 hours after a small meal. After nearly a year, I went from a pudgy 172 pounds to a skinny 138 pounds.
Then Thanksgiving came. We did our usual meals in Chattanooga without incidence. Olivia and Susan, however, came down with a stomach virus. It seemed to have cleared itself up by the time we got there, and Ian had thoroughly disinfected everyone and everything. We went up on the Saturday after Thanksgiving day and decided to stay the night. On Sunday coming back, the virus hit Amy in a nasty way. The trip, thanks to stops for Amy and horrible traffic, took 4 hours instead of 2. When we got home, Amy stayed in the bathroom for hours. Around midnight to 1 AM, we had to go to the ER. We spent the next 6-7 hours at the ER. They had to hook her up to an IV and put 3 liters of fluid back in her. They gave her medicine that managed to quell the upset stomach and let us go home and get to sleep. For the next day or so, the diarrhea kept up. I got a little bit of the diarrhea but managed to hang in there. We were out of work for 3 days while we replenished lost food and fluids and regained our strength. We had to get better by the next week. We had a Disney vacation scheduled for December 6-13.
Amy’s system seemed to settle down for the most part. Towards the end of the week in Disney, it was acting up again, but nothing Immodium didn’t seem to take care of. When we returned home, Amy was still having problems, but it seemed mild and manageable. No biggie. Starting the week before Christmas, a new symptom cropped up–cramping. It seemed to get worse as the week went on. That gets us to last night. There was blood. We went to the ER again (for the second time in 25 days), but there was a long wait. After about an hour, Amy was feeling better and we decided to come home to sleep it off and wait until morning. We woke up a little late this morning, and Amy went to the Physician’s Health on Hamilton Place Boulevard. She spent a couple of hours waiting until she went back. She saw their “doodoo doctor”. The doc thinks it could be one of three things: bacterial, amoebal, or some sort of ulcer collitis or something along those lines. They prescribed her some drugs to take care of bacteria or amoeba and gave her a stool sample kit. She got everything taken care of with the kit and took it back to Physician’s Health. Now we’re waiting on the results of the stool samples. She’s still cramping and I’m just trying to keep things clean and comfortable for her.
At this point, I’m making a New Year’s Resolution that for 2009, we’re going to get better and stay better. I’ll update when we know more. Hopefully the meds with take care of whatever is causing the cramping, but it may take a day or two.
