emergency room

i had a set back tonight and spent the evening in the emergency room.  The meds which had been prescribed, vicodin, for pain had been working and stopped.  The pain became so incredibly intense, i’m not sure there are words to adequately describe it.  I’ve had kidney stones in the past which where insanely painful and this pain easily exceeded any agony I’ve ever experienced.

In the ER they gave me 5 doses of Dilaudid, supposedly one of the strongest narcotic pain relievers in existence, over a 6 hour period with zero pain relief.  I don’t think I’ve ever cried from pain and I spent a large percent of the time with tears running down my face while waling in extreme agony.

They performed more x rays and completed a CT scan of my chest, abdomen, and legs.  intially they found a small amount of pooling liquid in my lungs and came to the conclusion it was produced by shallow breathing due to the pain.

The CT showed no other organ damage and verified there are 6 ribs broken in multiple locations along with the scapula break.  Thank goodness there are no other problems.  The pain in the end was being produced by spasming muscles near fractured ribs.  Thus they have removed me from the vicodin and put me on a regiment of muscle relaxers, anti-inflamatories, and alternate pain killers.  With the 3 way approach my 6 hours of torturous agony came to an end quickly.

I hope and pray this new approach is effective in pain management.   The next few weeks are going to be quite sendentary to allow more healing.

I want to thank my friends Annie and Sae for all their assitance tonight.  It would have been harder to go through tonight without assistance than it was to spend the week in a nightmare Africa situation due to the level of pain.