Charlie hospital visit 17th March 2019

The first couple weeks of March were some of the worst health weeks I have ever had. But my experience with A&E was one of the best yet. I went into hospital on the 17th March and although I shared it on facebook I wanted to document it here too, so those of you who aren't on facebook. This is what I wrote at the time:

***Health update*** The last couple of weeks have been quite tough. We have had doctors out once in the middle of the night for a suspected kidney infection (now we are thinking it's probably an Endometriosis flare) and then I was taken into hospital with chest pains last night. Even though I am at a high risk for clots and infections I tend to avoid going into hospital as much as possible and ignore symptoms I shouldn't because everytime I go in, I come out worse, purely because my neck can't handle the stress of sitting upright in fluorescent lit rooms and the stress makes most of my comorbid conditions flare.

Although I do feel quite a lot worse now, it was the quickest and smoothest hospital visit I have ever had. Went in at 10.30pm home in bed by 3am. Went in an ambulance, came back in a st. johns ambulance mini bus with a stretcher. They brought the hospital bed into the house to pick me up and drop me off, I was lying down the entire time. It was pretty amazing, all the doctors, nurses and paramedics were awesome, they respected how sick I was, I really didn't want to go to hospital and explained my situation to the out of hours doctor so she called the hospital I requested, where most of my consultants are based and where I have had the best experiences, not the hospital nearest to us and arranged it all so I would be admitted as soon as I got there and tested for a Pulmonary Embolism and aspirational pneumonia asap, as they were the two things she was most concerned about but knew that keeping me in hospital in my condition would not be good for me. So I bypassed the A&E que, everyone was respectful of what this doctor had put in place and was keen to only keep me in for the bare minimum, even arranging to a johns ambulance transport home. It was pretty amazing, thank you NHS and all its wonderful staff. They all seemed very interested to learn about my condition which is often not the case and upcoming surgery too and all wished me luck with it. ❤

My gastroparesis has been really bad the past few weeks, I have had regurgitated food and stomach acid at the back of my throat constantly, so we are thinking the chest pain is from that. I had told them I thought this was a possible cause, but as I am a high risk the doctor said they had to rule these other things out, she was a pretty awesome doctor! The chest pain is still bad but at least all the imminently life threatening causes are ruled out and I am hoping my surgery will have an impact on my gastroparesis, if not, its possibly time to consider tube feeding. But I'm going to try and manage it the best I can until surgery and reasss afterwards.