twisted cyster (aka out of commission)

My week started out so typically. Monday afternoon I worked at the library on my dissertation. I made a nice, focused “to do” list for the rest of the week, and worked at editing the article/chapter draft I wrote last week. I was looking forward to a “normal” week of going to work, and then heading to the library every day to cross all kinds of things off of my list.

But, nope. Instead I’ve spent the week at the hospital.

It all started last Wednesday night. I had horrible cramps/pain in my abdomen. It went away though, the next morning, and I chalked it up to my period. Then, I continued to get horrible pain at intervals through the weekend, but I took aleve, and went on with my daily business of working out etc. Sunday night things got really bad again, and I started worrying that maybe what I was feeling was another ovarian cyst. I had one back in 2004 that ruptured on its own, but caused a tremendous amount of pain doing so. The difference, though, was that that pain didn’t come and go like this pain, over days and days. Jo noticed my stomach was bloated and a little “lopsided” and I definitely had the pain on the side that was more swollen (the left). But, I’m incredibly stubborn. So I took more aleve Sunday night and went in to school on Monday.

Tuesday morning the pain started up again, and started getting worse and all could do was curl up in a ball and moan. It was so bad, that I actually called my obgyn. They wanted to see me right away. After giving me the first of what would be many injections of painkiller, they sent me in for an ultrasound.

Waiting for the utltrasound was awful. I was curled up in on a couch in the lobby of the hospital moaning and trying to play solitare on my ipod to take my mind of the pain. At some point I just started to cry, and they managed to get me in a little earlier for the ultrasound. The person who does the ultrasound isn’t supposed to tell you anything they see. But, the woman who did mine gasped audibly and then started saying how bad she felt for me. I could clearly see on the screen that there was something very large in my stomach that didn’t look like it was supposed to be there.

Indeed, I had another cyst in my ovary. This time much larger (5 inches). At that point I was sure they would probably want to remove it, but instead they sent me home with vicodin, explaining that it would probably rupture on its own. Nice. I wasn’t very happy about being sent home, but I also wasn’t in the position to protest much. So we went home.

Well it turned out the cyst didn’t rupture on its own, and the painkillers did nothing. Nothing. A couple more hours of suffering later, we called them and they decided that removing it was probably the best thing (ah, duh!). So, Jo drove me back to the hospital. I couldn’t even walk at that point. They admited me right away and started pumping me with painkillers. But the painkillers did nothing. Not a damned thing. At least I had a private room to moan and cry in on my own– and the nurses were the nicest, awesomist people in the world. I spent Tuesday afternoon and evening trying to handle massive amonts of pain, while Jo rubbed my back, and a nurse asked me for painstakingly small details about my dissertation in an attempt to distract me from the pain (that sort of worked, actually). She tried everything in the book to try to make me comfortable, and she really rocked. All the while, the doctor raised hell in surgery and managed to get me in there earlier than scheduled (around 8pm) and finally, someone just knocked me out of my misery already.

I woke up in recovery, and found out that they managed to save my ovary (despite the cyst that had grown to 7 inches and was twisted around my ovary multiple times) and that they took out my appendix while they were in there (I guess we don’t need those). The rest of the night I spent being cared for by wonderful nurses and sleeping and sleeping in relative peace, considering the fact they woke me up for pain meds and vitals every 45 minutes or so. Compared to the pain of that afternoon, I felt great.

Now I haven’t stayed in a hospital since I was 15, and some things have changed and some are the same. One of the stranger things they do now in the hospital is “scan” your ID bracelet whenever they check your vitals or give you meds. Literally, it is like the scanner at the cash register, and it made for multiple jokes about working at WalMart all through the night. A slew of doctors and residents came in early in the morning to check on my stomach and incisions, and I guess at one point I decided I could get myself in and out of bed without help and managed to tangle myself in the IV cord. I ate some food that morning (yucky hospital toast– how they can screw up toast, I don’t know) and they sent me home around mid day, seemingly on my way to feeling better.

But at home overnight I started feeling worse. Very sick and very dizzy. The next morning, we called the hospital and I groaned when they told me to come in. I literally went in in my PJs, feeling seriously horrible. I spent the day being wheeled around for tests by some wonderful nurses (again, are nurses ever not wonderful??), who insisted I looked “adorable” even though I hadn’t showered in days. I got more pain meds, injected into everyplace you can imagine. I’ll leave out the more horrible details, but I ended up getting a CT scan to make sure I didn’t have any kind of secondary infection, or nicked bladder (ugh!). Fortunately, I had none of these, so they sent me home again with more pain meds.

And finally I am starting to feel better. I slept relatively well on the couch last night and the cats seem to know not to pounce on me. My stomach is still sore as hell, but that’s to be expected. I ate real food last night (cereal) and drank a little coffee this morning. I managed to go through some of the hundreds of emails I’ve been ignoring. Basically, because of the surgery and the pre-surgery pain, and all the pain meds, I’m just going to have to listen to my body and take it easy for a few more days to recover. This is hard for me to do, but I’m managing. To keep from trying to work today, I think I’ll watch the first season of Dead Like Me. And let me tell you how awesome the people at Meriter hospital are. All of them. I think I’ll send some thank you cards. And Jo has been a serious saint– I don’t know how she’s managed at all.

So that’s where I’ve been, dear readers. If you’re lucky I might even post pictures of my cyst in all its twisted craziness, because, well, you have to see it to believe it. I’m so grateful to have wonderful people around me (and great painkillers) through this ordeal and to finally be on the mend!