Crazy Town Full of Surprises

So, after I gained control of the asthma, I then caught a cold. Primarily due to stress. Both our elderly dogs tried to die three days before we were due to leave town on vacation. The sickest dog, of course, fell apart on Friday, which made it tough to find medical care.

Two vets and $1500 later...we had a wait and see situation. It looked like he had cancer in his spine or he might recover the ability to walk and be fine (don't you love medicine? So specific!). Since he needed to be crate rested, we boarded him with the second vet we saw on Saturday and went on vacation with heavy hearts.

However, the process of figuring all that out, going from 'we need to put him down' to 'he might be okay' really put my heart through the wringer. We had tickets to a Broadway play the night before we had a game plan and I was sobbing in our box seats before, during and after the play.

It was a comedy.

I made my husband cry.

Fun times.

Fortunately, our yellow lab is doing better. We don't know how long we'll have him around, though. His spine problems are pretty severe and he is advanced in years, meaning we aren't going to do much more than make him comfortable at this point in his life. For now, we're just focusing on loving him and plying him with delicious treats without making him fat (which he's on prednisone, so that's kind of tricky, but we're trying).

The stress, though of getting him squared away, took its toll. A few days into our vacation, I was sick. The asthma was bad with the cold, but I pulled through on my own with just the Symbicort and Albuterol. I did flirt with needing prednisone, but, thankfully, the asthma improved.

So vacation ended and we came back home where I had a routine blood pressure follow up. Well, routine quickly went out the window as I was diagnosed with a hernia that likely will need surgery.

Oh-kay. Did not see that coming, but it does explain a lot.

Unfortunately, after the physical exam where the doc shoved my gut this way and that, I had escalating abdominal pain. By last night, I couldn't even lay down without excruciating pain. Sitting and standing were better, but still with lots of heaviness and a dull ache.

I kept trying to go to bed, but the pain was too bad I couldn't stay flat. So I went to the ER convinced I was the beginning of the next Aliens movie.

Just because nothing can ever be simple, they couldn't find any reason for my abdominal pain except maybe I had early pancreatitis and.... the CT scan shows something on my pancreas.

In case you didn't know, that's pretty bad ju-ju. You don't want things on your pancreas. Ever.

They didn't say cancer. They said I need an MRI for a closer look.  (Let's all hope they weren't just being tactful.)

And it might not even be the source of my pain anyway.

Which I still have, although my abdomen did let me lay down finally around 5am this morning.

Naturally, my GI doc is booked through October. Apparently, they either don't have emergency appointment slots or I don't warrant one.