An ER visit worth writing home about (preceded by some TMI, just so you know)

Lately, I've been having a little medical issue that isn't quite related to my pancreas - well heck, I'll just tell you. This fentanyl patch that I wear, being an opiate, has the unfortunate habit of slowing down peristalsis of the intestine (meaning that it slows your gut to a crawl and greatly decreases its squeeze-squeeze-squeezage.) While I am on a "bowel regimen" (probably too much information, sorry) of MiraLax and Colace, I will admit that I maybe haven't been 100% faithful to the regimen. Occasionally I'll skip a day. (Nevermore though, nevermore.)

Anyway, the thing is, I was literally full of crap. Hardy har har.

It actually has made me really, really sick - I feel so sluggish and spend lots of time sleeping. I have no energy and not much of an appetite, and I stay nauseated with abdominal cramping, on top of the pancreatitis. I've been working with an urgent care doctor who first tried lactulose. No go. Then magnesium citrate, which may as well have been water. Then he took an xray, saw that I'm indeed full of crap (but not visibly obstructed and there are no dilatations - i.e., areas that look like they're about to explode.) So now, I'm on the five-star regimen: mineral oil 3x/day, lactulose 2x/day, and MiraLax, Colace and Sennakot once a day. Fuuuuuun. Guess what, though? All of that stuff just made the cramping and nausea worse. So I finally went to the emergency room (and you know how I HATE being an ER patient - if you don't know, see previous posts here and here.)

I went to a different ER than I went to in those two horrible accounts, though (if you know me and are from around here, it's the "green" one, not the "blue" one. The one where you're more likely to find the most medical students.) Well, they were ridiculously nice. They asked me if I was in pain and gave me some Dilaudid and Zofran without me even having to beg and plead for relief. Then they did some "washing out" procedures which I totally don't want to do again, and then they gave me another dose of meds and sent me home. But the ER docs were SO nice, and the experience was just a 180 from the mean and ignorant doctors I encountered at the "Blue Hospital".

I'm still feeling really tired and sluggish with general malaise, but maybe it's getting better. We'll see. I go to the pain clinic on Wednesday, and I'm going to ask for an extra dose of my breakthrough meds for each day because six days out of seven, I have about 5-6 hours of severe pain (in addition to the other two peaks of breakthrough pain) and nothing to treat it with. That's one of the reasons went back on leave - I just can't work with that much pain. I complained about it at my last appointment, and do you know what they gave me? Seroquel. Which is an atypical antipsychotic. I'm beginning to think that I don't like this clinic as much as I thought I did. Please pray that the appointment will go well - it's Wednesday afternoon.

But for now, yay for the Green ER!