Eric, I knew what you meant. I just hope you and the doc can connect. It never fails we can walk away from the phone for seconds and it will ring. I missed a very imporant call from the nurse today about a matter, But, I called for an appt knowing full well it would be at least a week before the dr could see me, cause the nurse stressed the dr said to schedule a 30 min appt to go over my test results. I underwent 3 CT SCANS with contrast New Years Eve and they came back abnormalities showing on the Scans. I was told to be in her office tomorrow at 2 so we will see.
Back in the fall of 04 I had a torn meniscus in the right knee fixed, then 3 weeks later a partial tear of the ACL fixed on the left knee. Lordy, I must have been out of my mind scheduling those so close together. I could not get up or down unless someone pulled me or sat me down, boy was that fun. I could not put any kind of pressure on my knees and I had no strength in them to push up. Well, I was going in for my 1st post op visit from the ACL surgery, and got the toe of my shoe caught in the lines on the concrete at the handicap parking ramp. I knew better than to fall so I am trying to stay uprighted and ended twisting my knee all to hell. By the time they got me in an exam room my knee was nearly a small cantelope size and it felt like my heart was beating in it. Doc wanted to put me in the hospital-I said no way, so he let me sit 3 hours with him coming in & checking on me and we watched this knee get bigger & bigger. When he saw I would not give in he let me go home but warned me on what to do if something else happened. He told me I was one of the most hard headed patients he had ever dealt with and he knew I was in horrible pain and he just could not believe I just sat there watching this knee get bigger & bigger. I came home and put this ice water wrap on my entire leg, I woke up from surgery with it on and it kept ice cold water flowing thru out it to keep the swelling down. It came with a small cooler that we kept full of ice and the melted ice water came thu a little hose that connected to the cooler looking thing. It was a great little contraption. Five days later I go back to see him, bu this time from my foot to the very top of my leg I am really swollen, it looked like I had 2 different legs attached to my body.lol. In pain from hell to say the least, my pain meds never touched it. He saw me in the hall and I never made it to the exam room-he pointed his finger at me & said this could be a blood clot you are going next door to the hospital to be admitted now. This time I went, I was nearly out of my mind in pain at that time.
I get admitted, no blood clot. After a couple days they did an MRI and I had torn tendons & muscles in the knee like crazy. He came in my room to see me-now I really liked this guy, he was great, he said well you really screwed it up this time. I spent 18 long months in a Don Joy brace trying to get that thing to heal correctly. In the meantime while being in the hospital, my pain mgt dr was at one of his other clinics in another town-so I got nothing for pain the entire day and most of the night the first day there. My pain meds I had taken at home had long worn off and they didn't do much to begin with, not for that kind of pain. I became a very agitated and irrate patient let me tell you, I was not nice. Then, when my pain dr finally showed up, here he comes with my ortho in tow, and they are apologizing because of this, well I guess I laid both of them out. I was knocked out for a good 3-4 days and it took alot of IV pain meds to get me comfortable. My favorite nurse was concerned because it was taking so much to get the pain down. I was too out of it to have a PCA machine so they just gave me the shots in my IV. I spent a week there mainly for pain control and it was a horrible week. When I came home the very first thing I did was flush every pain pill in this house. Here I had been on IV morphine for 7 days-well you know what I went thru, plus I was already sick on top of it. But, I made it thru it. A week later saw my pain dr and he wanted to know how the meds were doing with my pain so I tell him what I did. His ole mouth flew open, he is like no, how can you sit here in this chair w/no pain meds for a week, I said I don't know but here I am. Well, after a long talk mainly about my fears and what happened in the hospital I agreed to get back on the pain meds and never stopped them again. What threw such a scare into me was I was coherent enough to know they were giving me large amts of morphine for pain and it was in my mind it was just making the pain escalate and I truly became frightened.I had made my mind up once I got out of there, no way would I take pain meds again. MY BP shot so high, they brought a cardiologist in for the week, he was working on getting my BP down, it was pure pain driving it up. So, thats my fun event of of self-induced withdrawals, of course now, I have a pain pump and life is decent, w/o it, my life was no decent.
Keep me posted on whats going on. Susie