It’s been over a year since my last post. A year chock full of new and exciting adventures for our clan. My mind draws a blank when it comes to what last summer, Summer 2019, held. I think it must have been the kind of enjoyable that you dimly recognize in the midst of it, that is documented with a random selfie, and can be recreated reviewing a calendar of events, but my memory bleeps and whistles beginning in September 2019, because my pancreatitis completely relapsed. Everything went to hell in a slow spiral after that.
For several years, I’ve managed my pancreatitis (for me, mostly gut pain in the pancreas several hours after eating) by getting a celiac plexus nerve block. The bundle of nerves that enervate the digestive track are injected with an analgesic and steroids. It’s not an easy procedure to perform, and often has no better than a 50% chance of helping, but my GI doc is a superstar with excellent aim and results. It typically takes me a week to recover from the procedure, and then I can live a relatively normal life with dietary management and no need for narcotics. When I start to feel some tinges of pain, I schedule a new block, and so it goes.
This time I had gone long enough without a serious episode that I missed the signs for months. I had my PT and massage therapist helping me with a nagging, mid-back pain, and I completely forgot that that was a symptom. By the time that I got in to see the doc at the end of September, I had begun spending most of my non-work time on the couch curled up with a heating pad and avoiding eating dinner. I dropped the thirteen pounds I had put on in my happier times. I reassured my younger son that once I came out of the procedure, it would be about a week and then Mommy would be up and running again.
It’s not like I really needed a reminder that I should never try to predict the future, and certainly not for my kid, but a couple of weeks later, there it was: my promise was broken. I was still couched and back on tramadol and vicodin. We limped through the fall as a family. My mother-in-law got me in to see the first of a couple of specialists at UCSF. We hoped to confirm that I had a vascular problem, but the vascular surgeon could find no evidence that my pancreas was angry because of lack of blood supply. Sad when you are crushed to find that you don’t need vascular surgery on a major artery.
I had another block done at the end of December. (Insurance will pay to have them done every three months.) It helped a bit, but only enough to keep me from needing vicodin. I still needed too much rest and tramadol. At the beginning of 2020, something had to give. I put in notice at my job. I would quit at the end of January. This way I could lay down during the work and school day, so I would have energy to commit to the kids in the evening. [A week before the end of January, my employer convinced me to take a leave of absence rather than quit.]
Really, it was all too little too late on the home front. People say that kids grow like weeds, but they behave like them as well. They’re hardy for sure and can take a trampling, but it does show, and they can look yellowed and wan from neglect. A spouse, however, a spouse is more like an orchid. (Well, my experience with an orchid. Orchid growers may liken them to a birds’ nest fern.) By the time that I stopped working in February, Sandy was basically done with it all.
February failed to provide the self-nurturing time that I hoped for when our spastic, mush-ahead, pull you with a mission, bloodhound experienced a life-altering disc injury. Her dog walks were canceled, all of her gear had to be tossed in the bin, new gear that wouldn’t pinch or move her neck had to be found, and the slow process of rehabilitating her mostly fell to me during the daytime. Still, I managed to lay down most days, I stopped losing weight, I found a new pain specialist who wanted to explore a new supplementary nerve block, I had met with another team at UCSF and had more diagnostics scheduled, and I had another celiac plexus block scheduled for the end of March.
February was also when Sandy and I began discussing how he might find happiness, and when he began looking for it with someone else. Of course, the story of our marriage’s struggles is another post. This post is about my obdurate body.
I would be turning 50 on March 1, so I saw my GP for my annual. My reflexes were in The my metabolic panel she ordered revealed that my kidney values had tripped into the slightly worrying range. Dr. Google led me to believe that maybe the overuse of an abdominal heating pad (for pain) could be the culprit. I went home and sobbed.