A visit to the ER

I first of all want to say again THANK YOU to everyone for the prayers, food, help with the boys, texts, facebook messages, flowers, etc. I am humbled by prayers and encouragement from all over the world. Here are a couple pictures of being home with my family. With that said I want to write a little more of everything that happened for my own record and for anyone else interested.

I had been having stomach pain pooping trouble emptying my bowel for a few weeks now. I diagnosed myself with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and told myself to drink more water and eat more fiber. Last Saturday morning the younger boys were napping, Brad and Chase were running to work to check email and the contractors were working on painting our ceiling. I had went to the bathroom and like normal my stomach hurt and immediately afterwards I felt like I had to go again. The stomach pain was back and stayed longer than normal. After a minute or two of not letting up I knew something was wrong. I tried to get comfortable, started running the bath water to relieve the pain but it just kept coming. It felt like a contraction that wasn't letting up. I actually thought it was kidney stones. It felt similar to the gall stones I had but lower in the stomach. I finally called Brad and told him to come back that something wasn't right. He asked if he needed to start making arrangements for the boys and I said not yet but called back a few minutes later and told him to go ahead and find someone for the boys and that I wanted him to take me to the ER. Some friends/neighbors were able to take Chase and our next door neighbor came over while Jacob was napping and was then to going to take him over to our friends. Brad came back, loaded up stuff for Gavin and we were on our way to the ER. Brad dropped me off at the front door and I stumbled to the front desk (after standing at a glass wall for a few seconds thinking it was an automatic door.) I described my pain and they got me in a room pretty quick. Of course, as soon as I get to a room I feel the pain start to decrease. I finally got an IV and medicine, talked to a PA and eventually got an x-ray and a CT Scan. My pain is pretty much gone by this point so I feel really bad for being up there. I was hoping they would find something so I knew the pain wouldn't come back and I wasn't wasting everyone's time. Meantime, Gavin has to learn to take a bottle and we worried that we are getting robbed blind by the contractors back at the house. Thankfully, our neighbors graciously agree to sit at our house until the contractors finished.  After a while the PA said that it wasn't kidney stones or my appendix but they did see a condition in my large intestine call Intussusception. It is not very common in adults so there is normally something that causes it and the doctor said were going to admit me that night and do a rigid sigmoidoscopy in the morning to look for a fatty tumor or polyp or something like that that was causing it. He made it very clear that he said a fatty tumor and a malignant tumor in someone my age and health was very rare.  Since I wasn't in pain at that time Brad was going to leave me there and go home with the boys.  A couple close friends visited and I had to start drinking stuff to clean out my colon.  More to come in the next post....