Wednesday, June 6, 2012

long and overdue...

This is absolutely pathetic. I have no blogged in almost two months. Where does the time go?  To recap what has happened in the past two months let me start with the tilt table test. I had been having an elevated pulse rate and my GI sent me for a tilt table test. Of course on the day of the test, I am not able to eat or drink anything six hours prior to the test and I had cleaned out the day before so I went in dehydrated. The guy running the test sees that I have migraines and says that there may be an issue with giving me one of the medications because it makes your heart beat faster. It is known to give people headaches and they don't administer that medication to people who are prone to headaches/migraines. I tell they guy that I do not care if I get a headache/migraine. This is my second tilt table test, I want results. After getting me hooked up to the monitors, he looks over at the screen and says that I wouldn't be needing that medication because my pulse was already in the nineties. A nurse came over to start an I.V. in case something happened and they needed easy access. The guy running the test was ready to call the cardiologist to cancel the test right before they found a vein. After three nurses and nine sticks, they found a vein.  I was asking if we could do the test without an I.V. They said no; I had passed out before, what if it happened again. They needed to be able to get to me via I.V. Luckily one of my veins finally cooperated and they started the test. My pulse got up to 142 during the test but the cardiologist overall said that everything was fine. I don't know that my pulse is running high until it is above 120bpm, sometimes it will be 146bpm for several hours. It is odd but it is all in what you get use too. It does wear you down physically.

The next thing that I've been dealing with is catheterizing. I had to go for an ultrasound of my bladder and kidneys. Thankfully my bladder was empty and of a normal size! My kidneys are normal. At my appointment my urologist and I were talking about how I slack off on cathing sometimes. That is something that I struggle with, I need to work on it. He explained to me that over time my muscles, due to this darn GP, will not cooperate anymore and eventually there will not be anymore shrinking of my bladder by cathing. I asked him where my kidneys played into this (because I'm a moron sometimes, it all gets twisted and confused in my brain). He said that if my bladder gets full, the excess fluid will back up into my kidneys and do damage. I have to cath to keep those bladder muscles in check as well as keep my bladder empty to protect my kidneys. Goodness knows I need another organ (kidneys - do you call it an organ or organs?) to become effected and damaged.


For those of you GP patients out there, you know when you're getting a flare up? For me it is like some of my everyday GP symptoms are turned up a notch or two. I can feel my body getting into the flare up mode. Since mid-November, I've been cleaning out every other day so flare up or not, if it's a food that set me off into a flare up, the magnesium citrate clean out usually resets me so I try and go on as best I can. My goal is to reach the clean out day and it will get better hopefully. It was the first Friday in May and I went to see my friends at my previous place of employment and just hang out with them while they had lunch. I didn't eat because I was on the end of a clean out and I just kind of felt off GI speaking. I just thought it was the clean out, nothing major. I ran a few errands around town and got some fries (fries were one of my safe foods... not anymore) before I headed down the mountain. I didn't make it out of town before I was having teeth gritting, abdominal pain. What in the world!? That was the first day of my flare up and this coming Friday will be the start of week five. It is absolutely ridiculous. The first two weeks I stayed on liquids for several days and then would try bland food which would go horribly wrong so I would go back on liquids. I finally decided to call my GI, maybe I was doing something wrong. He put me on the step one clear liquid diet. I got really weak and started to get one of those really bad migraines from not eating. I'm still having to clean out during this period and I take six Zofran a day for nausea and it's not touching the nausea. I finally broke down and ate some saltine crackers, I didn't care at that point. If I didn't get rid of the migraine, it was just going to make me more nauseous. I called my GI and told them that this is not working, the Zofran is worthless. They called me in a different type of nausea medication but it didn't help either. It's bad when liquids make you nauseous. I called again and of course my GI doctor is on vacation this week (I have perfect timing as always). Luckily his PA called me in a stronger milligram. I am going to go back on the step one clear liquids, no cheating this time. Migraine or no migraine this flare up has to go! Five weeks is long enough. Hopefully this stronger medication will help and get me over and out of this flare up.