Tag: Hospital

I’m having a flare-up. Should I go to hospital?

Published on by Bubbles in the BrainLeave a comment

It’s a question I see a lot in endometriosis support groups: when is it worth going to the hospital?

It’s no secret amongst people with chronic pain – and, I suspect, particularly women and femme-presenting people with chronic pain – that going to hospital is sometimes the opposite of helpful. You will often have to wait in the emergency room for hours before getting a bed, which can be deeply uncomfortable. Once you’re in a bed, you are usually offered a panadol before anything else, and have to wait to demonstrate that that’s not doing anything before you’ll be offered a stronger option. Typically, I eventually get offered codeine, which I hate taking due to the side-effects and the fact that it doesn’t really help my pain – it just makes me too spacey to react to it normally. However, I’ve never been offered an alternative – if I don’t take it, I tend to just get ignored until I eventually cave and accept it, because “there’s nothing else we can really do for you.” Upon taking it, I tend to be sent home pretty quickly. For those who are offered stronger medications – morphine or ketamine, for example – the relief lasts as long as the drug. Once the medication is out of your system, you are back to being in pain until the flare-up ends. In my experience, hospitals have been reluctant to offer me a bed when all they can offer are painkillers, whatever the strength, although I know others who have been able to get ketamine infusions.

From the perspective of the patient, the offers of hard drugs can create hard decisions. The side-effects of strong medication, whether opiate-based or not, are really not fun. Constipation is the least of the issues you may have to deal with. Many of the options are also addictive.

Then you have the problems with perception. If you don’t seem to be in enough pain, you might not get taken seriously. If you cry and scream, you’re ‘hysterical’. If you ask for a particular medication because you know that actually works, you risk being labelled a drug-seeker.

Overall, the hospital experience for an endometriosis flare-up can suck from beginning to end. However, if you are suffering from excruciating pain, it may be what you need.

Here are some circumstances when I would always consider a visit to hospital:

  • If you had surgery. It can be hard to differentiate ordinary post-surgical pain from bad post-surgical pain, so if you have recently been under the knife and are experiencing serious pain, it can definitely be worth getting it checked out. If you can wait to get in with your specialist, by all means, do, but if the pain is too intense or you are too worried, it is always better to be safe than sorry, particularly if you are also experiencing a fever or there is something not right with your incisions.
  • If the pain is different to your normal pain. My usual endo pain is a strong ache, low in my abdomen, with a sort of uncomfortable pins-and-needles sensation. However, if the pins turn into large knives, or the ache becomes a fire, or the pain otherwise feels qualitatively different, that’s something I want to get checked out. You never know what else might be going on that your endometriosis symptoms might be masking. You don’t want to find yourself in surgery for a ruptured appendix or ovarian cysts because you just assumed that your endometriosis was up to new tricks.
  • If you have other symptoms along with it. If your pain has become sufficiently bad that it is causing you to shake, vomit, or black out, it is definitely time to get help.
  • If it is simply too severe for you to cope without serious pain relief. Sometimes, it does get beyond the point of tolerance, and there is absolutely no shame in seeking medical help to reduce the severity of the pain, or increase your ability to tolerate it. Remember that your tolerance may not always be the same; pain that you could cope with on Friday may drive you to the hospital on Monday, because you are too tired, or too stressed, or you have been feeling pain too long, and you just can’t cope as well as you could last time. That is absolutely fine, and you should never feel bad about that.
  • If the flare-up has lasted for an unusually long time. If it goes on for longer than usual, or longer than you can cope with, you may need the sorts of relief only a hospital can provide in order to give you a break, even temporarily.

Ultimately it is a judgement call, and the person who is best placed to make the decision about when to go to hospital is the person in pain (which feels really unfair, because I know I certainly don’t make my best decisions when I feel like there’s a live, cranky tiger in my uterus).

I should be clear that I don’t want people to be put off hospitals by what I have said above. Whilst there is often little a hospital can do for someone suffering a chronic pain condition, and whilst one bad doctor or nurse can make the whole experience hellish, sometimes a dose of medication and a kind medical professional can make the world of difference. I want to acknowledge the reality (and my own experience) that a trip to emergency is generally pretty awful, but that doesn’t mean it is the wrong choice.

I hope this is of some help in guiding my fellow sufferers in this decision. If you want a TL;DR – better safe than sorry!

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Pills and Thrills

Published on by Bubbles in the Brain7 Comments

CW: drug use

Does anyone else get really really annoyed at the number of side-effects doctors expect us to tolerate?  

I warn you now, this is a rant and not a useful post.

On Sunday night I was in bad pain.  I don’t really know why or what was causing it, but I knew it hurt more than I could cope with and that I needed to be at work the next day.  So I did what I have been told to do when the pain gets really bad, and took some tramadol.  

I haven’t taken tramadol in a long time because it has a habit of making me a bit whacked out.  I avoid endone for much the same reason.  Both make me spacey and sleepy but send my mind racing at a million miles an hour, leaving my super-active brain stuck in a body that feels like it is suffering sleep paralysis.  I also don’t feel that they have much of an impact on my pain levels.  The next day I feel weak and shaky.  I don’t really like either of them.  Also, they both make you constipated.

Sunday night took things to a new level.  I took my tramadol at around 9pm.  I was fine at first in terms of side-effects and went to bed with a heatpack to wait the pain out. Half an hour later I was genuinely concerned that the doctors had replaced my innocent painkillers with hardcore hallucinogens.  

I’ll preface the rest of my experience by saying I’ve never taken illicit drugs of any kind.  I’ve never even been drunk.  I have no interest in perception-altering substances, so drug users out there may read this and go, “ah, you innocent child, thinking this is bad.”  I don’t know.  My poor little mind was bending.  

By midnight I was still not asleep.  My brain had carried out a really, really detailed mediation between my cat and my dog.  I could talk to animals, you see.  I forced myself to get up and go to the loo and was swaying like a drunk woman.  I could feel the world tilting, melting and floating around me, like my foothold on the earth was tenuous at best.  

When I got back to bed, I started crying because I felt like my arms were melting into one another, and I couldn’t tell my elbows apart.  I felt like my hands were on backwards.  I was being eaten by the bed.  I couldn’t move.  I could just about articulate to my husband what was happening, and I know I sounded pathetic and barely coherent.  

I was awake, my mind racing and my body distorting, until around 4am.  It was nightmarish.  I felt like I was living the Coraline movie.  

When I woke up the next morning, my body was wracked by tremors and I was so weak I could barely hold my phone to send an email to work saying I’d be late.  I was dizzy and nauseous.  The whole day I was tired and weak, couldn’t eat properly until mid-afternoon, and was really struggling to articulate my thoughts.  I would just lose the ability to say things halfway through the sentence, even though my brain was making the right pictures.

The only thing that made my pain reduce?  Time.  And quite frankly, even if the tramadol had worked, I’m not sure it would be worth the hassle.  

I know that I’m far from the only person to experience problems with the pills meant to relieve pain.  I’m far from the only person to have horrible side-effects with something as fundamental to the treatment of endometriosis as hormonal birth control.  I consider the issues I get – bloating, abdominal pain, tender breasts, mood swings, weird cravings, reduced energy – to be relatively minor, because we are told they are common and not really worth troubling a doctor about.  

Why are we expected to have to deal with this?  Why must sick people choose between pain and suffering from their illness and pain and suffering from their treatment?  Why am I in the situation where I’m forced to call in sick, not because I am ill, but because I attempted to use my prescribed medication?  Why, if I go to the emergency department, will I be offered endone as my only option, and be kicked out as soon as I take it?  What else can I possibly do?

Gosh, I hate endo.  

Total Pelvic Peritoneal Excision: One Month On

Published on by Bubbles in the BrainLeave a comment

One month ago today I had the surgery I desperately wanted.  Regular readers will know that, sick of incredibly debilitating pain and sick of being told to wait it out, I contacted Dr Edi-Osagie in England and asked him to undertake a surgery I couldn’t get an Australian doctor to do: Total Pelvic Peritoneal Excision (TPPE).  Today I want to share with you my experience of this surgery and my recovery over the past month.

Unlike a normal excision, which simply digs individual lesions out of the peritoneum, or lining, of the organs and pelvic wall, TPPE also removes the peritoneum so that endo has nothing to grow back on.  In my case, the good doctor did this to the back of my uterus and my urethra, which was where the endometriosis was growing in my case.  

I much preferred the preparation for the surgery than what we have in Australia.  In Australia, you have to drink a variety of icky liquids that give you appalling diarrhoea, and not eat for a day. For this surgery, I simply fasted overnight and had an enema.  Embarrassing?  A little.  But honestly, I’d rather have a nice professional nurse sticking whatever it was up my bottom than drink litres of glop so foul-tasting that it’s even odds as to whether you expel your insides through your mouth or your backside.  For those who’ve never had surgery, I cannot properly convey how bad that stuff tastes, particularly when you haven’t been able to eat all day, and have been on “white foods” only before that.

The day before the surgery I had all my testing and whatnot, and the day of I met a whole reel of nurses, my anaesthetist, and finally, Dr Edi-Osagie. Due to distance, we’d only chatted on Skype before this.  He is as lovely in person as he seemed on the computer, and was very careful to ensure that I understood what was going on and had no fears about it.  He was very thorough in his post-surgery explanation too, taking me through all the photos of my innards (which I got to keep!) and, unlike many surgeons, waiting until I was awake and functional before speaking to me. I’ve had previous surgeons explain to me while I’m still drifting in and out of an anaesthetic haze, and by the time I woke up properly, I would only retain about 1/10th of what they were saying.  By waiting til the next day, Dr Edi-Osagie ensured I actually would remember and understand what he said.  

Initial recovery from was painful, although no worse than my last excision.  As with last time, I woke up in recovery with the shakes.  Jury is out on whether this is pain or cold or both, but an extra warm blanket and having control of my own morphine supply sorted it out.  I remained fairly dependant on the morphine until mid-afternoon, but after that did not need to use it again.  By the evening I was sitting up and had my catheter removed so I could use the toilet independently.  By mid-morning the next day, I was ready to go home. 

A note for vegans: the hospital I was in did not have any vegan options for dinner.  Bring something.  

The biggest problem initially in my recovery was the shoulder-tip pain. When you have laparoscopic surgery they blow up your abdomen with gas so that they have room to work inside your pelvis.  Not all of that gas comes out immediately, and it can bounce around your diaphragm and up into your shoulders, leaving agonising pain in its wake.  It’s kind of like having a stitch, but 100x worse.  The only thing you can do is try to move to a different position, use heatpacks, and drink lots of peppermint tea.  

Once the shoulder pain started to reduce, I became aware of a new problem: constipation.  The trouble with morphine, codeine and tramadol, all of which I used post-surgery, is that they constipate you terribly.  I’m normally a 2-3 times a day type of girl.  My surgery was on Sunday, and I did not poop again until Wednesday.  When I did, I was stuck in the loo for about 20 minutes because things were so slow-moving.  My poor insides felt so bruised.  

Lately I have also been experiencing bladder pain.  Urination has been uncomfortable since the surgery due to my urethra being stripped all the way back, but a week ago my bladder or uterus or something in there was in agony when I peed.  It is calmer now, but still uncomfortable. It isn’t a UTI – there’s no burning and I’ve had it tested just in case – but boy, it’s not fun.

Overall, recovery from the actual surgery has been remarkably good.  I have four little incisions, which have all healed beautifully. My peritoneum is about 3/4 regrown now, apparently.  I did about a 5km walk less than two weeks after the surgery without too much trouble. Walking wasn’t really a problem at all after about a  week or so, although standing still remains an issue, so I used a wheelchair for things like shopping or going to museums, where you walk and then stop, walk and then stop.  

One month on and I’m fairly certain that all my remaining issues are attributable to my new mirena.  I find the adjustment period for the mirena really rough, and I’ve had ongoing spates of bleeding and period pain (not necessarily related to each other) for the past two weeks. If those aren’t gone soon, I’m going to talk to someone about having the mirena removed and see how I go without it.  

It is really nice not having endo pain in the way I have come to know it.  If I can get rid of the mirena pain I’ll be a happy little chappy.  At the moment, I’d definitely rate the surgery as a positive experience.  I hope to know properly by the new year whether it has really worked or not, and I will keep you all updated.  

The Selfishness of the Sick

Published on by Bubbles in the Brain1 Comment

There’s a weird thing that you experience when you’re chronically ill that you just don’t feel when you are healthy.  That’s the sensation of feeling selfish for wanting to be healthy.

I’ll try and explain.

When you have a cold that won’t go away and its really bad, you go and see the doctor, because you expect, quite rightly, that a cold should clear up.  After all, healthy is your normal state and it is to that state that you would like to return.  You don’t feel selfish for wanting to be healthy again, and that is absolutely as it should be.  The doctor doesn’t imply that you should just learn to deal with being sick better, or suggest that maybe you should just settle for a less bad cold than what you have because after all, it could be worse.  They listen, they give you your antibiotics, and you generally don’t leave feeling that you are being silently judged for wanting to be rid of your cold.

However, when you are chronically ill, it’s a bit different.  First of all there is the adjustment stage, where you have to learn to accept the fact that you will never be healthy in its true sense again.  That’s a topic for another post, because it really deserves a proper article.  Even when you’ve adjusted your own expectations, though, you have to deal with the expectations of the medical profession.

When it comes to endometriosis, a lot of doctors (not all, but too many) leave you feeling like you are asking for too much.  Hospitals are the worst at this – they just want to get you to a point where they can turf you back out with a pocket full of endone and not be their problem anymore.  Contrary to what you see on House or Scrubs, there is rarely any follow-up, insistence on solving the problem or finding a miracle cure.  Hospitals won’t keep you til the pain has reduced enough for you to walk easily or return to work.  They just wait for you to say that the pain seems to be reducing slightly, and you’re gone.  I know that hospitals are underfunded and understaffed, but it really makes you feel like a massive burden rather than someone with a right to health, or even a life without constant pain.

Private gynaecologists don’t have that excuse, but they do it too.  I’ve been told that I should expect to live the rest of my life with a base level of pain at 4/10 every single day.  At my last gynaecologist, I raised an ongoing issue that was causing me pain and inconvenience and he just seemed utterly uninterested.  After all, I could walk, couldn’t I?  What is worst for me is the silent undercurrent that seems to say “Why can’t you settle for what you have?  Why isn’t this good enough for you?”  It makes you feel naive and worst of all, selfish.

It isn’t enough for me, though.  I’ve had a great experience lately with Zoladex, a subcutaneous implant that dissolves over time and puts you into artificial menopause.  It has effectively ended a three-month flareup during which I could barely work.  At my last consult with him, Dr Edi-Osagie asked me if simply staying on the implant and avoiding surgery was an option for me.

I did seriously consider it, but in the end, I decided to pursue surgery anyway.  This is for a few reasons:-

  1. Zoladex has been a big improvement on where I was, but my quality of life is still nowhere near what it was prior to my first surgery;
  2. As long as I’m on it, I can’t conceive, and whilst I’m not in any rush to have a baby I do want the option;
  3. If the surgery is successful, I can come off all of the artificial hormones I’m on and let my body go back to normal, which is something I haven’t had in ten years;
  4. Zoladex and the accompanying hormone replacement therapy is expensive (about $160 a month for both);
  5. Being in menopause does have some not-so-great side effects, such as hot flushes, an increase in peach fuzz all over my face, and messed up sleep patterns;
  6. If I don’t take the opportunity to have this surgery, I may never have the chance again, and I will regret that forever.

I felt rude, assertive, guilty and incredibly selfish saying to Dr Edi-Osagie that near enough just wasn’t good enough for me.  However, he acknowledged my concerns and was so supportive of my decision, just as he was in my first consult.  I cannot recommend him highly enough.

It is really hard, asking for more.  Previously being beaten down by the health profession and being socialised as a woman against being assertive, which society reads as bad and bossy, as well as against being selfish, makes it really hard.  Women are taught to be passive and self-sacrificing, and sick people are told to be patient and grateful for what we have.  However, the risk has totally paid off for me.  Even if this surgery achieves nothing, I can fall back on the Zoladex, something I wouldn’t have if I had settled for my previous gynae’s advice, just like I wouldn’t have had the improvements in my health that he gave me if I had stuck with the advice of the two before him.  I now have a specialist who is supportive, validating and proactive.

So, if I can give one piece of advice, it is this: be selfish.  Ask for more.  You should not have to settle for “good enough” when it comes to your health.  In the end, you may have to, but don’t stop trying as long as you have the resources to do so.  It is your health.  It is your quality of life.  You are allowed to be “selfish”.