And he is not fun to be around when he is sick. All common sense flies out the window and he can't stand to be alone at all, so it doesn't help for me to just grab my purse and head to...well in this town I would have to head to Wal-Mart or the flea market. I might as well stay home with the patient.
A few days ago he went to the doctor with symptoms of stomach discomfort and some indigestion. They did an ultrasound and told him that he has inflamed spleen tissue. He doesn't have a spleen anymore, but I guess the tissue keeps trying to regenerate and is now inflamed. They gave him an antibiotic to keep the tissue from getting infected and a pain pill. He took one of the pain pills on Tuesday night and it did bad things to him. I got upset then because he admitted to me that what he is feeling is not really acute pain, just aching and discomfort (read: something that would be better helped with Tylenol).
I'll c&p this next part out of an e-mail I sent my friend this morning about what happened last night after he called me and asked me to come home from my volunteer job because he was feeling so bad and contemplating the emergency room:
He was feeling very nauseated. He had a pill in his hand about to take it when I came in. I asked what it was. He said it was hydrocodone (the stuff that made his heart race and scared him half to death the night before). I said, “before you take that, how bad is your pain? Have you tried Tylenol or ibuprofen yet?” He said, “Oh, I’m not really in pain, just uncomfortable and nauseated.” I told him to put down the hydrocodone and he said, “but why did the doctor give it to me if I’m not supposed to take it?”
The man really would jump off of a cliff if he thought that someone in a white coat had implied that maybe he should think about jumping off a cliff.
He was ready to go to the emergency room because he is convinced that he is having the same problem he had when he was 15 and 19. When he was 5, he fell off of a roof and busted all sorts of stuff in his abdomen. He ended up having blockages and surgeries at 15 and 19 to fix things that hadn’t been fixed properly when he was 5. Those incidents both started with terrible nausea and stomach pain.
He is running a low fever, which makes me concerned that maybe his spleen tissue is infected, but I convinced him to ride out the nausea until morning to make sure it wasn’t just a reaction to the pill he took (that lists nausea and stomach pain as the most common side effects). Nausea scares him to death now because of the diabetes. If he can’t keep food down, he can’t keep his blood sugar up. But he never did throw up, thank goodness. We set the alarm and got up several times in the night to take his temperature and his blood sugar. This morning he says he doesn’t feel nauseated, but his stomach is still “uncomfortable” and he still has a litle fever. We shall see.
I just a friendly gal looking for options.
