(Attention: The following post contains very personal and explicit content)
Hey lovely people! You may have been wondering why I have been away for the last three weeks. Well, that wasn’t unplanned at all and you can be sure that I am sorry as well for not being able to write for such a long time. I am still recovering from a rather scary story regarding sudden health issues that came totally unrequested… or at least I didn’t see them coming.
Remember how positive I had been about quarantine and confinement and how I thought I was trying to make the most out of it? Well, after the last three weeks, I went to a dark place and now I’m really struggling to come back to positiveness.
Since Covid-19 and the lockdown started, I, as probably every mom in this world, told my children not to climb around and avoid every accident or illness since we couldn’t afford to go the doctor or the hospital due to the pandemy. Well guess what? The kids have been alright, but the mom hasn’t. On Easter Monday, I woke up with a strong pain in the lower abdomen. I thought it could be ovulation pain, it wouldn’t be the first time. But as the hours passed, the pain intensified and I got scared. On Tuesday, first hour in the morning, I called my gynecologist only to find out they were on holidays. I called all gynecologists I had been to but all of them were on vacation - for the entire week. Right - there were actually Easter holidays for schools. I managed to get an appointment with another gynecologist although I had to wait for the next day. On Wednesday, I went to the doctor. He didn’t find anything in his are of expertise but told me it could be the beginning of an appendicitis, so he gave me a medical referral for the hospital. Imagine! All this time trying to avoid exactly that kind of situation and now I was going to have to confront it in the middle of a pandemic as an asthma patient!
I took a taxi to Vivantes Friedrichshain praying during the whole trip for it not being an appendicitis. When I arrived there, I was surprised to being welcome by a nurse acting like a security guy asking questions related to possible Covid-19 symptoms. When he let me in, the ER was empty, thank God, with only other three patients. Soon, I was inside with the nurses who took blood and urine tests. I had to wait for about three hours, mostly breathing through the face mask. When the results were ready, a doctor told me that according to them, everything was alright - no inflammation, no infection whatsoever, so I could go home and take pain relief. No one went beyond but the pain was still there.
The next day, thursday in the morning, I woke up very early. I couldn’t sleep well due to the pain. So I returned to the hospital. Again, they took blood and urine. Again, I waited for hours in one of the examination rooms, with my mask on, until a visceral surgeon appeared with the results. Again, no inflammation, no infection (again, thank God) and he asked me to go home and keep taking pain relief. But then I told him that my father, as a colleague of his, said the should make a sonogram in order to definitely discard any problem. Only when I told him this, accepted and called a colleague for the sonogram. She couldn’t see anything and told me it could be a ruptured follicle during ovulation. Again, I should go home and take pain relief.
The next day, on Friday, I felt better. I even went for a walk with the kids. But then, in the middle of the night, It started again and really bad. So, once more, I took a taxi to the hospital where I was not well received by the nurses who told me that there was nothing that they could do for me anymore. The doctor on duty came, asked me if I had been to the loo for number two and then I realised that due to the pain I had been too afraid and incapable. So he gave me a laxative and told me to return during the day when a gynecologist was there. I did and again, there was nothing. I went home and took the laxative. My father, on the other hand, told me that after all what happened, he was sure that the pain was intestinal and I shouldn’t take any pain relief pills anymore but some I brought from Colombia for intestinal illnesses. I did and they really helped, although the pain was still there. That evening my parents told me to contact my cousin. She is a general practitioner working at the hospital of a very small town in Brandenburg.
I talked to her and she immediately told me not to go to the ER anymore and that she would take me with her to the hospital on Monday in order to clarify my illness with her colleagues since her boss happened to be a gastroenterologist. On Monday afternoon we were there. Her boss did a sonogram but didn’t find anything. So they decided to go beyond and programmed a computer tomography for the next day. I felt awful being again in a hospital, away from home, insecure of what was going on, exposed to the pandemic and as vulnerable as ever. Not even when I gave birth to my kids, I was so scared. When you give birth, you know what is going to happen. Now, I felt I knew nothing and was scared of having any serious disease.
The next day, they did the computer tomography and luckily, all went well, there was nothing worrying but the sight of an acute constipation and that was the actual reason of the pain. So now, you can imagine what had to be done. Everything in there needed to be evacuated. But it was not the end of the story. In order to come to a final diagnosis and discard any further problem, the doctors wanted to make a colonoscopy. And there was a lot of stress involved. While my father in Colombia agreed that it should be done but some time later when there was no inflammation, the doctors here agreed that there was no risk doing it. There was a lot of discussions until I followed my cousin’s advise that it would be safe to do it. So I did, two days later. And folks, everything is ok, besides a little detail: I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome and apparently it is genetic.
So finally, I was released and went back home after four days at the hospital. When I returned home in the evening, while trying to eat something, I got the most horrible weakness attack. After all, all I had eaten was some toasts and had a lot of laxatives but no water. It lasted until Saturday, when I was able again to be some kind of normal with almost no pain. But now, there was another worry: I had been in two hospitals. In the first one, the entire personal staff was wearing face masks and me too but the first day I was so in pain that I could barely breathe and so, I put the mask down for a while. Therefore, I was terrified of being exposed to Covid-19. That thought didn’t leave me until last week, when the fourteen days of my visit in my hospital were over. But also a little until yesterday, fourteen days after leaving my cousin’s hospital. I kept telling myself that nothing was going to happen, since I had been using the mask and the patients in the first hospital were really not many while waiting and we all were place far away from one another. But still, the fear was there.
I have also felt so vulnerable because, once again, if there wasn’t for my cousin, there was no doctor who would do the most to help me. None of them in the first hospital went beyond the blood results. It feels that they just don’t care. I understand that the ER is only there to save lives, that they already have a hard time with Covid-19 and that the way the system is designed does not allow more. But it surprises me that they don’t act til they find a proper solution. Being a doctor requires following a vocation in other to help others. If I hadn’t have my cousin helping me out, I really don’t know how things might have ended. It is a very scary panorama. Last week, again, I was in pain and tried to contact a general practitioner in order to get a referral to a gastroenterologist. It was impossible! I didn’t find anyone! Not the one where I was a patient, not another one. How I solved it? It called my cousin’s dad, who is also a general practitioner in Spain!!! And he managed to calm me down.
You see, the gastrointestinal system is directly connected to your brain. So, if you have so much stress, things can get nasty down there. I don’t know where that stress came from. I thought I was coping well with all the current situation. Apparently not entirely. Apparently, I am very afraid of being exposed to the virus and that triggers a lot of stress in me. Now, I need to take care of myself, of my nutrition. There are many things I shouldn’t eat (which I like the most) and others that I need to eat in order to keep things working well. Now we need to cook for the kids and my husband - and for me. It feels like a lot. But it is how it is.
But what hasn’t changed is the fact that I am very grateful for being healthy. Because there is no serious illness. Because my my kids and my husband and all my family in Colombia is doing well in this hard times. They are all healthy. And health is the real deal. Because all of us depend on it and it all we do and achieve does as well. Now, it’s time to focus on it and take good care of ourselves. And I’m happy to be back to the blog and slowly start again to share more thoughts and stories with you.