My own personal Hurricane due to Health

I am not even sure where to begin. I could fill a million pieces of paper with what has happened since 2003. I will just put it in a time line as it relates to my health:

2003: Eclampsia during my pregnancy with Maya (where the liver and kidneys start to fail and very high blood pressure...can cause strokes)

2004: Left knee surgery due to too much running and sports. Dr. wants right knee done....NOT

2005: Gallbladder surgery, two Ovarian cyst surgeries

****Somewhere in between this time, I had to have my appendix removed.

2006: Emergency Hysterectomy. ( I had a tumor that was fortunately benign...but, they wanted it out immediately for fear of cancer.

2007: Major abdominal surgery, fixing adhesions left from other abdominal surgeries), Pancreatitis (wasn't a surgery....but, landed me back in the hospital in a step down unit. Meaning not in the ICU, one step down from it)

2008: At a bare MINIMUM...12 hospital stays, 6 surgeries, 3 ambulance rides, and numerous ER visits.

This year alone has been unreal....hospital bills, a ton of specialist bills, (even though we have great insurance), A surgery that had to be done at Duke by the Head of Biliary Division. I was originally at Rex Hospital where they had never seen anyone like me before. Sent to Duke. Where two of the best surgeons had to work on my bile ducts near the pancreas. My bile ducts were closed and one doctor had to go into my side and make a path for the other surgeon to come in and cut the ducts and put in a pancreatic stint. Absolutely, positively probably the worst pain that I have ever felt....it is up there in the top three.

Other surgeries included internal hernia removals, adhesion removal, exploratory surgeries for what was causing the original pain.

This has led to low blood sugar and low blood pressure....I can faint on you in a heartbeat if I don't recognize the signs. The signs are not too hard to miss for me....you begin to look and sound as if you are in a can and the whole world starts to slowly go dark in my world. Hard to see anyone. It is like an out of body experience. I don't really feel present.

The most recent hospital stays have lasted for about a month. This was where my bladder/kidneys/colon just stopped working. Landed me in the hospital time after time with excruciating pain. I thought I was scared before....but, this last time scared me so bad that I have done a lot of soul searching and literally feeling like I have hit the very rock bottom. I got a type of infection from an IV site (in the hospital), so when I got out my arm ballooned up to the size of a football players arm. That landed me back in the hospital for another week. This time, I was hooked up to every kind of antibiotic that you could imagine, I started to get sicker and sicker just being in the hospital. There were nights that I silently cried because I was truly worried that I would never make it out of there. All I thought about was my family.

The doctor and surgeon wanted to take out my colon...NOT GOING TO HAPPEN unless it is a matter of life and death. The urologist did a lot of tests and found significant problems. Both of these are going to take a long time to fix.

SOOOOOOO.....where is the laughter and looking on the bright side in this? I will write it in my next blog entry....