Road to Recovery

Its been two weeks since we welcomed little Mary to the family, and I'm now finally starting to recover and feel good. I was having bad pains in my right side, chest and back right after coming from the hospital. I was nauseous and was having a hard time eating and keeping things down.

At first I just thought that it was the after effects of the labor, even though I had never felt this bad after Hazel, but after a week of pain that wasn't going away with pain meds and not having eaten anything but yogurt and a little chicken dumpling soup we broke down and headed to the Emergency room. After some chest x-rays the doc decided that I had pneumonia and that it was causing the pain in my upper body. He put me on some antibiotics, but the pain still wasn't getting any better and I was so hungry that it was making my nausea even worse.

So this past week we headed back to the doctors to get some more tests done. I had a CT scan to see if I had some how gotten a blood clot in my lungs and to see if the pneumonia was getting better. Well, the results came back negative for both. No clot, and there wasn't even pneumonia, so I had been taking antibiotics for nothing. The next thing on the doc's list to check was my gallbladder. So we had an ultrasound, but it didn't show that anything was wrong with it physically. The next step was to get a HIDA Scan to see if it is functioning properly. They inject you with some radioactive stuff so that they can take pictures of it for the first hour, and then they inject you with a chemical that makes the gall bladder work so they can take pictures for half an hour to see if its working properly.

As it turns out, mine isn't working right, so now we'll be setting up surgery to have it removed in the next couple of weeks. For right now I'm running on Zantac to help keep it under control, and when its under control I don't feel any pain or nausea. YAY! The doctor who did the HIDA Scan told me that its very common for pregnant or postpartum women to experience these kinds of problems with their gall bladders.

I'm so grateful the doctors were able to figure things out and  I won't have to worry about problems in the future. I think the hardest thing about going through all of this was not being able to take care of my family and house the way they needed. I will admit this once and I'm sure you will never hear such horrible words uttered from my mouth again as long as I live, but I really missed being able to cook a meal and clean the house. Now that I'm on the mend for the moment, I've been napping and cleaning the house as much as I can. It just feels good to have a clean home again and a good meal on the table that I can actually eat and enjoy! Its amazing the "chores" we take for granted on a day to day basis.