Frustrated & Still in the Dark

I'm still feeling awful. I went back to out-of-hours yesterday and again I was sent home. Apparently if I take codeine on it's own, instead of co-codamol (codeine and paracetamol combined), it will help. Erm... No, it won't. Something is seriously wrong. I am now losing weight at an accelerated pace and my stomach is red raw from all the heat packs I've been using for comfort. 

I feel like today is the day I would run away if I thought doing so would leave my bad health behind. I am so incredibly depressed. It's Father's Day today and I couldn't even make my hubby a cup of tea. I ruined my daughter's 11th birthday and then I ruined her sleepover. I wasn't well enough to prepare anything. Not even small party bags. I can barely get my breath. If I talk the pain starts to intensify and the breathless gets worse. I haven't had a bowel movement now in 7 days! My face is pale and my eyes are dark. I look like a zombie! 

I just can't handle this anymore. I have this impending sense of doom just hanging over me like the world might actually end any moment and this is from being so depressed because of how ill I am feeling.

Just how long can this go on for? The new flank pain reminds me of how it probably felt in the medieval times when they used to stretch people on those awful torture machines. It's such a bizarre feeling and I've given up trying to guess which organ is being effected. 

My poor family don't know what to do with themselves. They don't know what to do with me. None of us know what to do!

The good news is an appointment with my gastro doctor has been organised for the 30th. The bad news is it feels like a lifetime away when I'm feeling so unwell. Could it really be Chrons? Does Chrons work like this? Is the abdominal pain felt all over, including in the stomach/pancreas region too? Or is it Endometriosis that's everywhere? Wouldn't the chest X-ray I had the other day have shown something?

Then I start panicking that it's something much more worse and sinister! I'm 30 now. 30 year olds get cancer. There's so much anxiety on top of the my general bad health that I don't even know what part of my body to work on healing first! 

I really miss feeling normal... I wish we were spending Father's Day having a BBQ in the garden, the puppy playing in his pool and the kids bickering over the swings. But instead, I'm laying in the same place I've been for the last 2 weeks, heat pack clutched to my torso, hubby quietly sitting beside me asking if I'm ok every so often. Curtains are closed. The day has been cancelled! Heck, the whole month has been cancelled.

Severe Abdominal Pain - The end of me?

It's been over a year since I last posted here. I guess because I don't feel anybody is really reading and there's this anxiety with not wanting my disease to define my life. But it seems that my bad health is taking over and I find myself desperate to share my stories in hope of finding others that can relate.

I thought that being sick with Rheumatoid Disease was the absolute worse illness I could be faced with -- my body attacking the fluid in my joints leading to deformities, chronic fatigue, deficiencies, and with a lower expected life-span. But then I developed mysterious abdominal pain that has left me beaten, bed ridden and at some points, suicidal.

In the last two weeks I have been admitted to hospital more times than I can count, had an ambulance ride and seen my local GP several times. Their answers are all the same - Everything's fine.

I'm disgusted that the only tests I've had performed for my 11 out of 10 scale of abdominal pain have only included a couple of blood tests and one chest x-ray looking for escaped gas.

I presented originally with lower right abdomen pain which led the doctors at the hospital to think it was either appendicitis or an ovarian cyst. Yet I was sent home, told to continue taking pain killers and see my GP. The pain began to escalate and was soon being felt in my upper abdomen, lower abdomen, right shoulder & arm and in my pelvic area. Pain so bad that we have had to abandon my car half an hour away from home because I couldn't drive it home, miss my daughter's 11th birthday, miss my husband's 30th birthday and not be able to eat for coming up to 7 days. From my own research, there are a few conditions which seem to match my experience with this to a T; Endometriosis, Chron's and Pancreatitis. But nobody will take me seriously.

Being an RA sufferer, treating this incredibly painful condition on very low dose pain relief, I will say  I have quite a high tolerance when it comes to handling any sort of pain. I gave birth twice with nothing but paracetamol to get me through. This abdominal pain, however, has been the most incredible, unbearable pain I could ever have imagined. And it's not going away. I've had no bowel movement for a week, my stomach has all sunken in and then yesterday I started the most painful period of my life, losing an unexpected amount of blood which has left me faint and with blurry vision.

It feels at this point like it will go on forever. How can the doctors not feel a CT scan at this point should be carried out? I have refused their pain relief offerings out of fear that they will think I'm drug seeking and I have cried endlessly. Tummy examinations have proved excruciating in certain areas of my torso but nothing has alarmed any of the doctors I've seen. Could so many medical professionals have all gotten this wrong? Or is it in my head, like I'm being led to believe? I don't have time to be sick. I have a business to run with a queue of unhappy clients wondering why I've not returned their emails. I have children with important things going on like birthdays, and sports and out of school clubs. I have a house move coming up in less than 2 months and I have my own dignity and peace to keep in tact. This is not the time to be sick with a mystery ailment that has completely floored me. My husband has missed nearly a week of work and faces losing his job. He's stayed by my side, helping to keep me comfortable. But what really needs doing at this point is a thorough investigation and this can't wait several months because I fear another week of this will be the end of me. You cannot go without food this long and survive! And the pain feels like it will drive me to do something stupid.

Living with Rheumatoid Disease is a walk in the park compared to the horror I'm facing with my stomach right now and I can't believe nothing is being done.

So as of right now, I am truly conquered by my ever-failing body. I give up! I'm waving the white flag! I hope that by the time I make my next post, I will have found an answer and this nightmare will all be over.