I was recently in the hospital. July 23-25, 2002
It seems that I had an ulcer. The nurse said it was a huge one.
I asked how often do you see "huge" ones? "Not very often" she replied. Hmmn.....
The good news is that I am still alive and barring any reoccurrence, I'll be back to "normal" soon.
If you would like the details, here they are:
I had one nice week of vacation in the sun, at the lake place, with my daughter and everything was hunky-dory.
It turns out that I had an ulcer last Sunday night/early Monday morning.
I bled while having a bowel movement at about 1:00am and again at around 2:30am.
This did definitely scare me, but it cleared up in the morning.
So, that is when I called in sick for Monday.
I never call in sick. In fact, I missed only 6 days of school K thru 12 and I never missed a day of high school.
I took it pretty easy Monday and everything seemed fine.
Well, Monday night was almost exactly like Sunday night.
Except this time I passed out for about ten minutes on the floor as well.
I felt very dizzy and light headed and I was "sweating like a pig".
I called my doctor's office in Olympia as soon as I could.
I talked to my soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law Carrie Johnson and she said get to the ER in Olympia right away.
The ER folks looked me over for a couple of hours and were going to send me home, but thank goodness my doctor said NO!
He isn't Dr. No, but Dr. Mark Bradford and he may have saved my life, who knows for sure?
So, I spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the St. Peter's Hilton in Olympia.
I got to have a tube go down my throat to check out my stomach.
Yep, that's an ulcer.
The specialist, William "Bill" J. Mitchell M.D., took pictures and grabbed some tissue samples.
He could of cauterized the ulcer then, but it was already healing.
Lot's of blood monitoring and pressure checks, they drew blood from me about every four hours and I got an IV too.
They put me on some medication and are going to see what caused the ulcer.
It seems that many ulcers are caused by infections rather than stress/poor habits.
I did admit being guilty of both of the latter.
If there is an infection, it needs to be treated as well as the ulcer itself.
Both my doctor and the specialist felt that the amount of aspirin that I usually take was the main cause.
Hear me now, watch your aspirin usage. I threw mine out when I got home.
It turns out that I had lost about 4 units of blood, roughly equal to 1/3 of what is in the average body.
Right now, I am still pretty week due to the loss of blood and iron.
It takes about a week to get back to total strength.
I hope to take as much as I can from a positive perspective from this seemingly negative experience.
I was recently in the hospital. July 23-25, 2002
