The Home Stretch

After waiting four days to see a doctor about what caused my trip to the ER I finally had an answer. I did have a dermoid cyst that needed to be removed if I was going to get any better and the only way to remove it was surgery. I was scheduled for surgery the following morning and was planning for at least one night in the hospital recovering plus a week of no activity which isn't really my kind of week.

still smiling

They weren't sure if they would be able to do it laparoscopically, 3 or 4 small incisions, because the cyst was fairly large but they wanted to try because the other option, 5 inch incision cutting through my abdominal muscles, would require a much longer recovery. During pre-surgery I was poked four times including twice for blood and twice trying to get an IV. Thankfully they use lidocaine to do IVs so they're not that bad. According to my nurse my veins are some of the most difficult she's ever worked with and made a joke about how I would have a hard time if I tried being an IV drug user (which I don't plan on being EVER)! After all that was over, my friends were allowed back into the room and we watched shark week until I was drugged up and wheeled off to surgery.The next thing I remember was waking up in the recovery room FREEZING with a dull ache in my stomach that seemed to get sharper. Getting up for the first few times felt like I was getting stabbed in the gut by a knife and it was excruciating plus I was annoyed that I had to get help to unplug from from all the monitors before I could get up but it got easier.

Finally, after a long night of compression boots and a blood pressure cuff waking me up every 15 minutes, the doctor retold me how everything went (he told me when I was in the recovery room and I don't recall any of it) and said I would probably be able to go home so long as my pulse and temperature went down (my pulse never went below 130 which kind of freaked the doctors out considering my resting is normally around 60). Around noon my pulse had gone down some and they thought letting me go may relieve some stress and in turn lower it further. So I was discharged in time for lunch and went straight from the hospital to Qdoba (all I had for a day and a half was 3 crackers and some strawberries).

I'm now on the home stretch a week out from surgery and can start running again tomorrow. Sometimes it's hard to see how all of this could be for my own good (other than getting out of preseason running and 3 a days) but I know God has a plan through all of this and He is reveling it to me slowly (which I'll save for another post). For now I'm just grateful that all of this is resolved and hopefully I won't have to deal with it again.

*and just to keep the tally going I had been poked a total of 9 times before leaving the hospital*

Trip to the ER...

There will be no pictures today but I do have quite the story to tell.

For the past few days I've had some severe stomach pain and two nights ago I finally had enough and let (not without a fight) my roommates take me to the hospital. Actually, I had passed out and it freaked everyone out enough to call my coach and ask him what to do and of course he said head to the ER. The doctors thought I had appendicitis so they shipped me off to get a CT scan, which thankfully showed that I didn't have appendicitis but they found something else that was just as alarming. They found a large dermoid cyst on my right ovary and they were concerned that it may be causing torsion (or twisting) of my ovary.

A friend who got off work at midnight came to relieve my roommate who had stayed with me until 1am, despite having workouts at 6am. Shortly after the trade off, the doctors came back wanting to do an ultrasound to see if they could get a better view of the cyst and determine if I needed emergency surgery to remove it. For unknown reasons (just unlucky anatomy I guess) they could barely see my ovaries but they did see some blood flow which was an encouraging sign. Because they saw some blood flow they didn't think two days would cause any more harm such as death to the ovary and/or infection but it meant the pain might not go away anytime soon and I'd just have to get an appointment with a specialist and have them run more tests to determine the urgency of the situation and the treatment.

So after being in the ER for almost seven hours, one screwed up IV, one good IV, three doses of morphine, three friends willing to spend their night with me, a couple of extremely awkward moments, many hilarious quotes fueled by drugs, and finally a diagnoses, I'm free for a few days and am just playing the waiting game. Hopefully, the waiting doesn't go into preseason because that could definitely cause some issues with 3-a-day soccer practices.

Thanks everyone for being there for me especially the three friends who spent some of their night sitting in an uncomfortable chair next to a hospital bed. You guys are the best!

Click it Up a Notch Photography Contest

Don't Cry Over Spilt... Water

I've been waiting for it to rain for the last few days so I could photograph the individual droplets hitting the ground. But since it hadn't rained and it didn't seem like it was going to, I decided to make my own rain! I filled a cake pan with water and stood a piece of paper up in it as the backdrop. Then I filled a ziplock bag with water, poked a hole in it and taped it to the wall above the cake pan so that it would drip in the same spot repeatedly at regular intervals. I set up my camera (one of the few times I wish I had a tripod) so that it focused on the spot the drop of water always hit and began snapping photos like crazy. After messing with the lighting, ISO, and shutter speed, I was able to snap a few good pictures BUT I also managed to spill about a gallon of water on the floor and my dripping contraption turned out not to be very stable. I hope that next time I try this I will have a tripod, a better dripping device, and a lot less spilt water. My roommates will be thankful that we don't pay for our own water after this little project.

Of course, it started to rain after I finished setting up all of this and instead of being mad I just went and took pictures of the real rain too!

They didn't turn out great but it was fun to play in the rain