This was a rough Summer.
I have been ill since June 3rd. After many visits to the VA Hospital, emergency rooms, and Doctor’s offices which still continue to dominate a majority of my schedule, I was left still with more questions than answers and no relief from my suffering. I had abdominal pain that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I was violently sick with extreme digestive upset, bloating, difficulty breathing, and unable to take in food and only extremely small amounts of water.
The days melted into a blur of weeks, like a puddle of ice cream on the side walk in Summertime, wasted. If being this sick wasn’t bad enough, being a disabled Veteran, I also had to deal with the bureaucracies of a terminally broken system. After exhausting almost all options with a Gastrointestinal Specialist, I was referred for two radiation tests with Nuclear Medicine: the first was for an Emptying Study that includes eating a Radioactive Breakfast and the second was a HIDA scan of my gallbladder. Though it was just in the past few weeks that some answers have begin to present themselves, this Summer in the 602 has been brutal on many levels.
The main diagnoses is Gastroparesis —
basically the nerves in my stomach stopped working, a paralysis of sorts, which makes absorbing nutrients from my food difficult. I am literally wasting away. The other issues that are coinciding is that my gallbladder is apparently only functioning at 20%, I have Gastritis which means the lining of my stomach gets severely inflamed and also ulcers in various stages of development in my esophagus and gut from all the digestive issues. These are just the problems that began June 3rd and don’t include my daily battles with chronic pain, Fibromyalgia, and PTSD.