To start off this blog, I’d like to talk about the day of my diagnosis. This is not where my journey started though because I was exhibiting symptoms before diagnosis. I realize now that these symptoms I had in high school became the norm for me. Therefore, I didn’t tell my doctor about any discomfort I was feeling after eating food (which is not normal) or any of the other unpleasant symptoms I had experienced. Word to the wise: Tell your doctor what you feel so you don’t end up in a similar situation like mine. Oof!
Okay, on September 12th 2017 I was rushed to the emergency room. I had been having some pain in the lower right side of my stomach for a few hours and it felt like an extremely tight knot but I didn’t think too much of it until the pain kept getting worse and spreading throughout my entire stomach. I sat on the toilet for about 3 hours once the pain got to a pretty high level, throwing up and having diarrhea. At the time I thought that I might have caught a very nasty version of the flu. After a very long time sitting on the toilet emptying my guts out, I finally felt decent enough to leave the bathroom because I was absolutely exhausted and I thought that I would be fine after some rest. I fell asleep fairly soon after leaving the bathroom but I was only able to sleep for an hour. I woke up at 5:30 am gripping the sheets in so much pain and when I tried to stand up, I could not even walk I was in such severe pain. To this day, this has been the worst pain I have ever felt in my life. You know when doctors ask you to rank your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 but you never really know what to say because you have nothing to compare it to? Well, this was a definite 10 and I don’t think anything has ever caused me as much pain as the pain I felt that night.
I woke up my ex-boyfriend who was luckily staying over that night and had been with me during that time. I told him to call the emergency room to let them know I was coming in. He took me to the emergency room on his moped and I was sitting on the back of it carrying a plastic Target bag in case I needed to throw up again. The bumps were unbearable. Thinking back on it, this was pretty comical in the fact that I took a moped to the ER. Makes for a good story I guess! Once I was there, I skipped the intake area because I could barely stand at this point. In my head, I still thought that this was just the flu and I remember texting my boss and saying that I was in the hospital but would come into work later depending on how long it took to discharge me. I also remember texting my coaches saying I would be at practice later even though I was at the emergency room letting all the contents of my guts out. I had insisted that my ex-boyfriend go home to get some sleep but he refused and stayed with me the whole time and then headed to class later that morning. This turned out to be a lifesaver as I really needed the support and help to get to the bathroom and to get the nurse’s when I needed them.
I sat in the emergency room room for 7 hours doing tests including Xray’s, MRI’s, blood and urine tests. Each test took about an hour to process which is why this took so long. My mind is pretty hazy about what exactly happened during this time as I was on multiple opioid strength painkillers like Vicodin and Morphine. I was on the maximum dose but still could feel the pain at all points in time, especially when I tried to move and go to the bathroom. The doctors finally ordered a CAT scan for me and when they got the results back, they calmly told me I was going to need surgery because I had a perforated bowel. I asked, “When?” and they said it was an emergency surgery and that I was next on the list for an exploratory laparotomy of my intestines. Essentially, this means they were going to open up my abdomen and look around for the diseased part of the intestine so they could take it out. At this point I was in such severe pain and on so many drugs I didn’t fully register that my entire abdomen would be opened up, I just wanted them to get it over with. About a half hour later, I was in the surgery room. The surgeon, Kaysie Banton (Thank God for her), told me to count down from ten and I went under only getting to 8.
The next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room and the nurse sitting next to me exclaiming that I was awake! I checked the time and it was about 4:30pm. I had gone into surgery at 1pm! The nurse told me they had called my parents and that they were rushing up here. I was confused because I wasn’t sure what the big deal was. Anesthesia really puts you out of it for a while. I promptly fell back asleep and the next time I woke up, I was in the hospital room with my parents and my ex-boyfriend. The doctor came in and told me that they had removed 4 inches of my small intestine, meaning I had a small bowel resection. They took out the perforated section and stapled my intestines back together (I still have these staples in there to this day and I see them on the colonoscopy pictures! Kinda cool!)
While in the room the surgeon came in and started to explain what the procedure was like and then explained that I had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. The last thing I remember from this conversation was her drawing a picture of my intestines on the whiteboard in front of me. I was on a high amount of painkillers and was still groggy from the anesthesia and I fell right back asleep to the sound of her explaining this new disease to my parents.
Life takes Guts 