Autoimmune: This Is My Story

Hospital

The school mass was two weeks away. A lot of emphasis, time, effort and energy was being put into this service. It would be the commencing service of the celebrations for our bicentenary anniversary of the founding of my school. It would be a very significant moment in our school's history. I was involved with the bicentenary committee. So, I felt a lot of pressure to push myself through the pain I was enduring and not mess up my role in the mass. Meaning I pushed myself to be in every day for practices. This worked for the first week. 

By the second week, my pain had worsened again. It was then that I surmised that I wasn't suffering from the helicobacter virus. And the next week, the week before the mass, I failed to come into school. That Monday and Tuesday, I felt so awful. I felt like I was letting everyone down and that I was weak for not going in. At the time, I didn't even have a diagnosis, and because it wasn't official, I felt like I couldn't claim that I was genuinely very unwell. 

The Wednesday morning, I was exhausted, mainly due to not having slept because of the intensifying pain. I slept in until the afternoon. And that afternoon, I felt somewhat okay. I decided I was going to come in the next day and throw myself back into the preparations for the mass. But then, Wednesday night happened. At about ten o'clock, as I was getting ready to go to bed, the pain flared up again. I found myself leaning over the toilet, on my hands and knees, once again coughing up that vile, thick, white fluid. The constant retching was giving me a headache. 

Quarter past eleven, and this still hadn't passed. My mother eyed me with concern, commenting that I was grey in the face. She guided me out to the car and sped to the care doc clinic. 

When we arrived at care doc, the doctor examined my abdomen. As he pressed my swollen stomach, I stifled releasing another paining belch. He furrowed his eyebrow at what he had seen. He logged onto his computer and said he would be referring me to A&E. 

We proceeded to the hospital, where I was brought to a trolley. A nurse took a blood test and I was left in a semi private room to wait until a doctor could see me. I was given a small container to continue to hack up the fluid that was building in my body. I was put on a drip, which made me feel drowsy. It did relieve a little of the pain, and helped me relax slightly, but only slightly. I was still retching. The doctor who came in to see me initially was adamant that there was nothing too far wrong with me. He told me that I could stay on that drip for about another hour and I'd be fine to go home. I was in too much pain to argue with him, so my mother fought my corner. But, what infuriated me even more, was that he proceeded next door, and stayed there for the next forty five minutes, entertaining a patient who was drunk out of his mind. 

Believe me, I know it was forty five minutes. There was a clock right opposite me and this guy was keeping me wide awake with his incessant loudness. I felt so unbelievably angry. The doctor was telling me that I had no reason to be here. And yet, he was willing to entertain a disruptive, vile mannered alcoholic, who, in my eyes, didn't deserve the attention he got. He was in hospital because he had willingly intoxicated himself with whatever array of substances were causing him to act so troublesomely. Maybe I was a bit harsh in that judgement, but that just didn't seem fair to me. 

That doctor couldn't be bothered to deal with me again, so he sent in another doctor to talk to me. By this stage, it was three o'clock in the morning. I knew I definitely wasn't going to be going to school that morning. The second doctor was one from my consultant's team. He told me he'd be sending me up to one of the wards of the hospital and that I'd at least be staying the night. 

That afternoon, I was sent down for a liver ultrasound scan. The one my consultant had been holding off on. I was told that until the results were back, that they'd be keeping me in. They said I would likely be off school for the rest of the week. I felt so annoyed at myself. I would be missing an entire week of school, and that thought evoked an extreme sense of anxiety over everything I would be missing out on. And the people I would be letting down, especially with the mass approaching the next week. 

After two days in hospital, the results of the ultrasound came back. They told me nothing showed up on the scan and that everything was fine. I was informed that my stay at the hospital would go on record with my consultant as well as the results of the scan. Before my discharge from the hospital, a doctor came to see me. I was told to avoid tea, coffee, tomatoes, spices and anything acidic for the time being. He told me he believed I had been suffering from gastritis and that eating those foods would only make it worse. I was prescribed tablets to line my stomach and Gaviscon to help with the belching, which they were treating as being chronic heartburn. What my consultant still had to figure out was what underlying problem had caused the gastritis in the first place, if that was what I was even suffering from.