Sudden turn for the unexpected | yosoyrosa's Blog

All seemed well, except that he'd reported pretty painful heartburn throughout the day.  Still, there was work to do, so he was at the computer for most of the day while I was running errands, after all, we had a birthday party to go to on Saturday night.  I came bounding in with only 45 minutes before we had to leave, and he wasn't looking good but claimed he just needed a shower to freshen up.  We made it to the vetrans hall, and he was belching up a storm even before starting on his diet coke.

Each time he complained, I rolled my eyes, wondering why someone with a sore stomach would be piling on a burrito on top of the tomale and chips that were already on the plate.  No salsa, no peppers was a good thing, and we even posed for pictures.  You could find me doing the chicken dance while he was having a piece of birthday cake, chatting with the neighbors.  When I got back to the table, I could see it in his face, it was time to go.  As fast as we rushed in, I was speedwalking into the local grocery store to get some more antacids.  Between the tablets and the pain pill, he slept throught the night, kinda.

The next morning, he woke me up asking me to call the nurse line.  The pain was getting worse and he was getting nauseous.  We confirmed the symptoms didn't resemble a heart attack, and figured that it was the medication kicking in and I went over everything he ate over the past 24 hours, confirming everything that is known to cause heartburn.  I committed to calling his doctor and would take him in to the urgent care if we couldn't resolve this soon.  He wouldn't eat anything, convinced he would vomit again, and laid back on the couch.  Hardened to months of complaining of such things, I went to the grocery with my list of lowfat heartburn friendly foods for the week. 

On my arrival home it was clear things weren't better, they'd just continued to get worse.  I checked again possible side affects of the medication, printed out the patient information and declared "that's it, we're off to the emergency room".  We paged the on-call hepataologist from the university and let him know we were on the way in to the local hospital.

During check-in, the staff seemed to perk up when my husband announced he's a liver cancer patient waiting on transplant, and his having chest pains. Within minutes he was surrounded by staff hooking him up to various monitoring devices.  Blood pressure was up to dangerous levels (219/107) and his head started hurting.  The whole ER adventure had begun, blood work and sonogram.

By the end of the evening we had a diagnosis: Pancreatitis

It looks like he'll be staying a spell