Day Four, Five, and Six - 10/27-29/07

The next morning Bruce called Dr. Hudson and explained that I needed something stronger for pain control. To his credit, Dr. Hudson came back into town (he was about 45 minutes away) to give Bruce a written prescription for pain medicine. He told Bruce that Oxycontin was the strongest narcotic he could prescribe for home. If this didn’t cover my pain I would have to be readmitted to the hospital. Fortunately, this medicine helped much better. I wasn’t pain free but my 8/10 pain was a manageable 4/10 with the med.

The antibiotic gave me cramps. I began to feel generally lousy –abdominal pain/cramps, nausea, diarrhea, diaphoretic/clammy, and a headache. This problem paired up with the surgical pain and I was a mess! I couldn’t drink anything that didn’t fire up my stomach. I was having trouble even trying to sip on Boost supplements. And four times a day I had to take more antibiotic and every four hours I had to take pain med. I couldn’t get on top of the GI symptoms. I had black diarrhea for a week after returning home (sorry - TMI, I know). I know that some of this was from blood from surgery but I think that the allergic reaction caused me to develop a gastritis for which everything irritated my digestive system. The small blessing in all of this is that I wasn’t nauseous. To give you an idea of how upset my stomach was- the first 48 hours home I lost 7 pounds! I continued to lose a total of 13 pounds in 5 days. I felt bad.