Doctor and Hospital

Beautiful view of the Duke Chapel.
This was the day I found out I got to go home, of course I was excited.
Dallin coming to visit mama at the hospital. Doug gave me these flowers to make the hospital room look nice.

I have stomach problems and I remember finding out before we came to Duke that they were a great hospital and highly ranked in GI stuff (they are currently ranked 7th in the nation in digestive disorders). I laughed and told Doug that maybe Duke could get to the bottom of my stomach problems. My stomach pains started to act up really bad the beginning of February so we decided I should make a doctors appointment. So on Feb. 19 I went to the doctors and had some tests done (most of which came back normal), and the doctor told me to go on a dairy free diet for a week to a week and half to see if that helped some. So I went on a diet and I thought things were going well.

On Saturday we had planned to go the temple. It was our ward's temple day and they were going to provide babysitting. I was so excited that we were going to get to go to the temple and didn't have to take time to find someone to watch Dallin. I was very excited. Unfortunately I woke up very sick. I was sick to my stomach and light headed. I quickly went back to bed and wasn't able to do much all day. I decided I wasn't going to be able to go to church the next and found a substitute for my Sunbeams. Doug took Dallin on a walk while I found someone to sub my class. He came home and I told him I found someone to teach my class and he immediately asked me what was wrong. He was very surprised that I wasn't going to church the next day and knew I was sick. I told him I didn't know, and then I had a very sharp pain happened in my upper abdomen that shot to my back. I was telling him to take me to the ER as the pain went away. So I told him I would be fine and needed some rest.

I went to bed Saturday night wasn't able to sleep very well at 3 o'clock in the morning I woke up to a really sharp pain in my upper abdomen that shot to my back. I tried to deal with the pain as well as I could on my own, but I soon woke Doug up because I didn't know what to do to stop the pain. After about an hour I told Doug that I needed to go to the Emergency Room because I didn't know what to do about the pain. It was absolutely awful: we had to go the ER (which isn't fun in and of itself), we both hadn't got much sleep, and we had to wake Dallin up and take him with us. He did fine for the first little bit until he just became extremely tired and he didn't know what to do about it. We had to wait a little bit at the ER, but fortunately it was early in the morning so it wasn't very busy.

They did some blood work and it appeared I had a urinary tract infection or a kidney infection and the other thing that appeared a little abnormal was my liver enzymes. So they wanted to do an ultra scan and cat scan in order to further investigate. Both of which appeared to be normal. Which after setting at the emergency room all day didn't make me very happy. They did some more blood work and that's where we finally learned something. I did not have the urinary track infection or kidney infection. I had pancreantitis, an inflamed pancreas. So they began to ask question trying to figure out why this happened. In 85% of Americans that get pancreantitis it is caused by alcohol (which doesn't apply to me, because I've never taken a drink before in my life) and gallstones (which seemed unlikely because I had my gallbladder removed 3 years ago). So I was admitted to the hospital.

I apologized to Doug all day that I was in the ER because I felt stupid for going there in the first place, I didn't like thinking about the medical bills coming from a trip to the ER. Doug calmed me down and assured me that we would be just fine and that he was glad we went to the ER because he didn't know how to help me at home. They whole day I kept telling Doug that next time I would just deal with the pain. Now after experiencing it I know that is not true and I told Doug that it was good we went to the ER because they would work until they found the problem. Sometimes I feel like I go to the doctors and if they can't find anything they just send you home. This time I knew we would find something.

I stayed in the hospital until Tuesday afternoon. I had a beautiful view of the Duke chapel from my window. I told Doug to bring the camera so we could take a picture of my wonderful view. So these are pictures from hospital stay. It was rainy so the view picture didn't turn out as nice as I would have liked.

I left the hospital with the doctors saying that somehow my body had created a gallstone and it had passed which caused the pancreantitis and doctors appointments scheduled. I was also told to go on a Low Fat but as close to Fat Free diet as I could for the next little while and that I would need to maintain a low fat diet the rest of my life in order to prevent this from happening again.

So they told me I couldn't lift more than 10 lbs and I was sent home back to being a stay at home mom with a 1 year old that weighs far more than 10 lbs. A couple days after I came home he got hand, foot and mouth disease so he needed or I guess I should say he wanted to be held all the time. I tried to limit the best I could but it was difficult not holding my sick baby. We both survived, though.