But I don’t know why. I guess I forgot to check my calendar or something. 
On Saturday, my nephew on my husband’s side got baptized and then we went to their house afterwards for a party, so I spent most of the day in a skirt and nice sweater, which made me think it was Sunday all day long. So when the real Sunday rolled around (the next day) I felt like I was living my own version of the “Groundhog Day.” It was Easter to boot, which meant a lot of sugar-high crazy kids in my nursery class, and my normal teaching partner, Sherry, was gone for the week, so I got a really quiet gal from our ward to “help” me who said almost nothing to me for two hours. Her son was in the nursery, so she spent most of the day wrestling with him and playing with him, leaving me the other seven. Not the most fair division of labor but apparently no one asked me for my opinion.
Then it was off to my in-laws house for Easter dinner–no one else in the family could attend, so it was just Doug and I. It was a fine dinner, other than we found out some very disturbing family news, and so then my MIL spent the rest of the dinner alternating between crying and well, more crying.
The next day didn’t go a whole lot better. I got up that morning and started all of the chores that I needed to do, in order to pack and hitch a ride with the in-laws to my parent’s house. My in-laws happened to be driving past my parent’s house on their way to a conference, and they offered to drop me off on the way, and pick me up on the way back home. Although I absolutely love visiting my parent’s house, it was a very stressful day as I was trying to do all the laundry, packing, and grocery shopping that needed to be done for the week before we headed out.
We arrived at my parent’s house in the early evening, and I was thrilled to be there, until I realized my parents weren’t there. Both of them were still at work. So I wandered around the house and ate raw cookie dough in the fridge. Nothing like taking a bit of time to get as fat as humanly possible. My parents finally arrived home, and my mom and I left to go out to eat. We talked and laughed–this part of my week was definitely the highlight of it all. Sometimes, you just need your mom to tell you it’s going to be okay before you believe it yourself. We stayed up late that night, and then I woke up early the next morning, at a startling 6:00 am.
This is simply unheard of for me (both the minute amount of sleep I got, and how early I woke up) but I decided to take the extra time I had, to do my hair in a fun design. I pinned it in curls all over my head, which looks a lot more difficult than it actually was (it was time-intensive, but not brain or talent intensive.) It was a great day to be dressed like that, because I was going with my momma to work! 
At age 26, I was finally doing a “take your daughter to work day” and I had a lot of fun with it! My mother’s coworkers were all really nice, and I enjoyed it all, except the dead skunk underneath the building of course. Everyone claimed they couldn’t smell it anymore (it had been three months since it died) but to me, it was overwhelmingly horrible. My throat hurt, my eyes watered, my nose ran…
Oh whoops, turns out I was just coming down with a cold. We left the skunk behind, and I was still sick. Junk in my chest, the whole nine yards. A quick trip to the physical therapist for my mother, and then we were home, where my in-laws greeted us. They beat us there, which I felt bad for, but then after I heard all the stories that my father told them to keep them occupied while they were waiting, I felt even worse. My father is well-known for his storytelling abilities, and also his tendencies to believe the mantra “This is my story, I’ll tell it how I want to!” wholeheartedly. My in-laws are the perfect subjects to test new jokes on, because they unfailingly believe everything told to them.
“Did your father really leave your mother on the side of the road to catch a ride home after her hysterectomy?” my MIL asked one day. I tried to hide my laughter, but it came ripping out of me anyway. My MIL is more gullible than I am, which says a lot.
So then there was the three hour car ride back home, with me getting sick and already sad at having to leave my mother…It was a long ride home is about all I can say. We finally got home and I went inside to greet my husband, expecting him to be anxiously awaiting my arrival, and instead I found him looking half-dead in the bathtub. “I stayed home from work today,” he said. “I spent all of last night throwing up.” Oh man, what a way to spend the night away from your spouse. I felt so bad for him.
Which brings us to Wednesday. Wednesday was not the best day on record, for a number of reasons. I was still sick with the cough and cold, junk in chest, etc, and was also given the “joy” of starting my period, or at least the cramping part of it. I got several jobs from a company, one of which ended up netting me $37 an hour, which of course was quite thrilling, but then the next job they gave me I made me less than minimum wage, and I deflated like a balloon. It’s hard to have get-up-and-go when you’re sick, cramping, and only making $4 an hour. I turned down the other work they had available, and decided to try to fight the sickness, but unfortunately it won. I spent most of the day wishing death and destruction upon whoever made me sick like this. I didn’t have a particular target in mind, just any ole’ person worked for me. If I was into voodoo dolls, I would have been whipping one out just then.
Thursday was the real toughie though. It my husband and I’s fifth wedding anniversary, which the hubby forgot about. Unlike many of the couples in sitcoms and movies, my husband will actually be more likely to remember an anniversary than I am–he’s good with dates and when people ask us, “So when did you two get married?” I’ll look at him quickly as a plea for help. “It was…” I’ll start, fumbling, and Doug will finish it for me, “April 12th.” Yeah, then. I was getting there. Umm-hmm.
So on Thursday, I found my cold had mostly abated (thank you thank you!) but the cramps only got worse. A whole lot worse. I took aspirin alternated with Excedrin, which I don’t like Excedrin very much because it has caffeine in it, and my body is not used to caffeine so I always end up with the shakes when I take that stuff. But that’s better than cramps. Between the two, and some liberal use of heat pads (one for the front, one for the back) I was surviving okay. The pain was pretty bad, but not unbearable. I was darn miserable though.
We spent the evening in the house together–Doug made biscuits and gravy for dinner (first time we ever tried that recipe–he did good!) and we watched “The Princess Bride” together. The time with us together on the couch by far the best out of the entire day. That movie is one of my favorites, so I really enjoyed watching it.
We went to bed soon after (about 9:30, crazy wild people that we are) and after talking and laughing some together, Doug fell asleep. I laid in bed, my cramps and stomach only getting worse. I had taken two Excedrin PM and some more aspirin, but it didn’t seem to be doing much. I finally snuck off into the bathroom and took a hot bath, hoping it would relax my muscles. All it did was make me very hot and very lightheaded. The pain got worse, and I started to feel bile rise up in the back of my throat. I hated to throw up, but it seemed inevitable. I was so sick. I read the Reader’s Digest, my head squarely aligned over the the toilet so that if I threw up, I wouldn’t have to worry about trying to make it to the toilet on time. My back muscles spasmed, and I curled up into a little ball on the bathroom floor. My stomach ached, and the bile rose higher, so I leaned back over the toilet, spitting into it in a last-ditch attempt to keep from throwing up. Am I the only one that does that? When I start spitting, you know it is only seconds before I start heaving.
I managed to keep the bile down, and ended up leaving the bathroom for a bit to lay on the couch. I was sweaty and lightheaded and puky…I only lasted a couple of minutes on the couch before I was back in the bathroom. I was moaning, trying to keep the pain contained. I had never felt anything like this before. The pain was incredible.
Several hours passed like this, and finally around midnight or a little later, I finally busted into our bedroom.
“Doug, I don’t feel good,” I moaned. He woke up, groggy, trying to figure out what I was mumbling about. He did rather well, considering what time it was. He tried rubbing my legs and back, but it didn’t help. I hurt so bad, the pain was so intense, I couldn’t sit or lay or stand without moving around. If I was laying down, I stood up. If I was standing, I sat. If I sat, I laid down. My arms and legs were restless–I think it was my body trying to take my mind off the pain. Like a child hocked up on sugar, I didn’t sit still for more than a second, maybe two. I was almost delirious from the pain shooting through my body.
“I’m leaving,” I told Doug, and pulled on some old ratty PJs.
“You don’t want to wear that,” he told me. Thus says the guy who wears ratty jeans and a t-shirt to work every day. What a time to be come fashion-conscious.
“Where are you going? You can’t go anywhere!” he said. Yeah, that was more of what I was expecting him to say.
“I’m going to the hospital. They are going to give me something for this pain. I must have something for it.” I grabbed my driver’s license, credit card (we have no insurance) and keys. My hair was wild all over my head, my clothing eclectic (to put it nicely) and I couldn’t stop crying. I’m sure Doug thought that if he tried to stop me, he did so at his own peril. Which he would have been right. I was in so much pain last night, nothing could have stopped me. Not a raging bull, not a massive hurricane, not a horrible earthquake, and certainly not my husband.
“You stay home and sleep. You have to work in the morning,” I said, and left. I had put my glasses on instead of trying to put contacts in (I couldn’t have stopped crying long enough to put them in anyway,) and I’m not used to driving with glasses on. Luckily, no one is on the roads at 12:30 at time of night around here. Most people are normal enough that they are fast asleep at this point. Idaho is full of boring people. That’s why I love it here. 
The excruciating pain only got worse as I drove. My truck was cold, which made my muscles cramp up even harder, and every pot hole or bump in the road shot massive pain through my body. I was on a cold, bumpy ride while experiencing some of the worst cramps that have ever existed in the history of mankind, and crying hysterically the whole time. It’s surreal looking back on it now. I think God was watching over me, making sure I didn’t do something stupid, like drive the truck into a light pole or something. I was in so much pain, I was barely cognizant of where I was, and I should never have been driving. But the pain shut my brain, and my common sense, off, and I didn’t realize what danger I was in.
I walked into the hospital, trying to stay calm and not cry. It’s embarrassing to cry, and I didn’t want to do it in front of complete strangers. There was no one at the desk, and so I rang the small bell placed there and waited for help to arrive. A security guard came out from the back first, and with one look at my wild hair, my face streaked with tears and twisted with agony, he quickly looked over his shoulder. “Jim?” he called out, trying not to sound panicked, but not quite succeeding. I’m sure I was a sight to behold.
The kid came out next. He was in his early twenties with long hair slicked back into a ponytail and earrings in each ear. I had never seen such a welcome sight in all my life. Here was someone who was going to give me drugs. Don’t care how much or how, just give them to me now. He shoved some quick paperwork at me (sign here, SSN there) and although I tried to have legible handwriting, it’s hard to write clearly when you’re crying and experiencing so much pain, the bile has decided to start coming back up again.
He quickly showed me to a private room (well, he walked quickly, I shuffled along in agony, my steps slow and unsteady. They offered me a wheelchair, but I wanted to keep my dignity by walking. I should have realized that was a battle I already lost, and just taken the wheelchair.)
A nurse came in soon after, and tried to ask me questions. “Do you have your immunizations?”
“Pain!” my body was screaming. It was impossible to think and concentrate.
“A tetanus shot?” she pushed. I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t know why. There was some reason I had had one in the last ten years, but my mind wouldn’t focus long enough to remember why. The tears were streaming down my face in an endless parade and after pulling my glasses off multiple times to wipe the tears off, I finally gave up and just left them on the table next to the bed. I spent the rest of the night in a blurry darkness. I can’t tell you what the doctor looks like, or the other nurse that I met later on. Everyone was too blurry. It added to the surreal feeling I had, almost like this wasn’t me, wasn’t my pain. I think my mind disconnected just a bit there to deal with the pain. I was there, it was my pain, but there was this gauzy barrier between me, and that crazy woman crying hysterically and wandering around in endless circles, trying to fight the pain off and not winning.
The nurse put an IV in my arm, and for just one blessed moment, my mind was jerked away from the pain in my stomach and back, and I felt pain in my arm instead. The reprieve was short-lived (seconds only) and then the pain in my stomach returned with a vengeance. I was sobbing so hard, my arm was shaking, and the nurse had a hard time trying to get that IV in, which I felt bad about and really tried to control the tears, but I just couldn’t. I have never felt pain like that before. I had a car land on my hand, my head go through the windshield, and my skull laid open to the world in a horrible accident in high school. I felt less pain then, then I did last night. On a scale from 1 to 10, I was at a 12, and I didn’t know how to fight it off.
She gave me pain medicine quickly followed by anti-nausea medicine, and although I didn’t feel 100%, I quickly came down off the high peak of pain I had been at for hours. That lasted about five minutes, and then suddenly it escalated again.
“Nurse?” I called. She turned and said, “Is it coming back?” I nodded. “I’ll be there in a second!” she called.
I paced around the room, barf bag on hand (I had demanded something to catch my throw-up in, in case I really did let loose and had been holding this plastic blue bag in my hand as a lifeline ever since.) I’m going to be okay, I’m going to beat this,I told myself.
I barely made it to the sink on time. I threw up so hard my rib cage hurt from the force of it. I did use the blue bag, but I was also worried in case the stuff decided to go elsewhere, so I wanted to be firmly planted over the sink just in case. Moaning, I retched three times, and then washed my mouth out with lukewarm water. Yuck oh yuck oh yuck. I scrubbed my tongue with the water, but it didn’t help much. I asked later on, and no one had any mints or gum or anything to chew on. I had a horrible taste in my mouth for the next hour and half or so. I hated that almost as much as I hated the cramps. I abhor throwing up.
The nurse finally made it back in, and she gave me more painkillers (this time she gave me morphine) and more anti-nausea medicine. This did the trick, and I quickly started to relax. The cramps were never 100% gone, but they were 98% gone, and I could live with that 2%.
They took me in to have an ultrasound done. The lady was pushing a hard object all over my sore tummy, and trying to point to blurry gray and white photos on the screen to illustrate something to me–I’m not even sure what. It hurt too darn bad, what she was doing, for me to concentrate on a screen I couldn’t even see. She finally told me that in order to figure out what was going on, she was going to have to put a wand up inside of me, and take the ultrasound that way. She warned me it would probably hurt. I told her if I was going to figure out what was going on, I could handle a little pain.
She was right about it hurting. She put the wand up inside of me and then shoved in all the way to the right, in order to see my right fallopian tube. Then she did the same thing with the left tube. I tried hard not to start crying again, but it was a tough battle. She was killing me with that wand of hers. She finally finished and let me get dressed. She rolled me back to the room and told me to sleep until the tests could be ran, and then the doctor would come in to tell me what was going on. I gratefully fell into a deep sleep from about 1:50 to about 2:30, with only a quick interruption when the guy who had checked me in originally brought this soft, warm blanket in and covered me with it. I don’t know if they just pulled it out of the dryer or what, but that thing was so nice. I was in heaven.
The doctor came in about 2:30 and told me the results. There was nothing wrong with me. My uterus wasn’t tipped, my fallopian tubes were twisted. There was nothing to account for my massive pain that I had just lived through. He referred me to a Ob-Gyn, and left. The nurse came in soon after and started handing me pills. “Here’s Vicodin for the next time you feel any pain at all,” she told me. “Don’t let the pain escalate–take something as soon as you feel anything.” She told me that since she had given me morphine, she shouldn’t let me drive home, but I told her I was fine, and I would feel really bad about calling my husband at 3:00 in the morning to come pick me up. She said she would pretend she didn’t know. She was a really nice nurse, and I’m lucky to have gotten her.
When I got home, I took a Vicodin, just in case. The last thing I wanted was to wake up in the morning with cramps. I was shocked to see Doug awake. Apparently, he had been up the whole time, worried about me. I felt so bad. I had tried to leave him at home so he could sleep, not so he could worry. We crawled into bed together and fell asleep about 3:45 this morning.
As strange as this sounds, I almost wish there was something medically wrong with me (a tipped uterus, twisted tubes, something!) just so I could have the surgery done and start to have normal periods again. I have had periods like this my entire life, although even for me, this was really horrible. It shouldn’t be normal to suffer this much pain, at least I wouldn’t think so. I am going to call the Ob-Gyn on Monday and see about setting up an appointment to have an exam done. While typing this, my cramps came back again and so I took one of those Vicodin the nurse gave me. I feel very funny now, and I think I’m going to go take a nap. I’ll update later on–hopefully I’ll have something cheerful and upbeat to say at that point! lol!
I feel strange, and I need to sleep. I hope you all are doing better than me–much love to all my friends and family.Hava
