A great big PICC me up!

Blog friends, today was a BIG day. I got to the clinic at 8:00 AM and just walked in my hotel room at 8:00 PM. During the past twelve hours, the following things have occurred:

1. I drank a disgusting amount of barium so the radiologist could take an up close and personal look at my stomach and small intestine. The nurse told me it wouldn't taste that bad...bless her heart.

2. I met with my internist again to access our progress thus far and discuss our plans for the next week...she even mentioned *gasp* coming home!

3. I had a meeting with the absolute best dietician I have ever seen. We are going to try a bunch of new formulas and see if my feeding tube and I can learn to get along a little better.

4. My doctors decided that I simply did not have enough bling. So I am currently sporting a 24 hour blood pressure monitor, that causes me to stand completely still every ten minutes. I got some interesting looks while trying to walk to my appointments today. I also got a PICC line, so I can stop getting in needle wrestling matches with every nurse who tries to take my blood. Mid-procedure, my veins clamped down...shocker. Guess we can see why this is necessary.

DRUMROLL PLEASE

5. I met with the GI doc again who told me...my gastroparesis is gone!

So, before you go searching the internet for details, allow me to explain. I had (haha! past tense!) idiopathic gastroparesis, which means an unexplained paralysis of the stomach. As it appears, somewhere in the past two years, I got a virus...most likely from my little darlings at school, but who knows. Chances are, I didn't even know I had this virus (I'm a teacher people, I don't have time to notice things like the fact that I don't feel well). This virus, in a nutshell, caused holy havoc in my body. Among other things, it caused gastroparesis. The "beauty" of having idiopathic gastroparesis is that sometimes it goes away.

My diagnosis now is visceral hypersensitivy syndrome. Basically after your body goes through enough trama, your brain decides that it has had enough, refuses to allow anything in and pretty much shuts down your system. Can't say that I blame my brain, but now I have the daunting task of retraining it. As my doctor said, "I don't envy you. This is one of the hardest tasks in medicine, because you can't just cut something out or take a magic pill." The next year will not be an easy one, my friends, but mark my words that I will get through it. I will meet with Behavioral Medicine in the next couple of weeks to create a plan for reteaching my brain. As far as my noggin is concerned, there is still a lot of chaos in my body. I need to show it otherwise. No big deal.

I'm standing at the bottom of a giant mountain, but let's be honest, I love hiking and the best view is from the top.