Drain Removal and Admission

Well, things didn't go as planned yesterday with radiology.  They went in and injected the drain with barium and ran some x-rays.  The abscess had drained completely, thus the reason there was no longer any output.  The sinus cavity into the jpouch, however, was still there.  Beit that the abscess had drained, the drain had done it's job and was okay to come out.

This is when it got interesting.  As they removed the catheter, a blood vessel was nicked in the process somehow.  Whether this was the result of my pain or not, we'll never know, but regardless, at this point I started to bleed profusely.  The doctor was able to manage the bleeding out of the drain hole (my buttock), but because of the internal bleeding, it was bleeding back into the abscess, through the sinus and into my pouch.  After losing the first unit of blood within a few minutes and a second unit of blood within another ten minutes, this is when the team started to panic.  They immediately hit me with an IV in case I needed to receive a blood transfusion, and I punched my ticket for an overnight stay in the hospital.

Over the course of the next half hour, the bleeding stopped, but I was still in tow to stay the night to be monitored just in case.  Just as well, as after evacuating over two units of blood in the past, I knew it was best to have the doctors keep an eye on me.  I've bled out before after previous scopes, but never like this:  This was a little scary, especially when I realized that they may not be able to stop it just from pressure and the doctors look noticeably nervous as well.  Once the pouch calmed down and I was no longer having to evacuate into bedpans, I was able to calm down as well.  It became a little comical at that point, once I realized I was going to be okay, and chalked it up to another interesting day that somehow turned out a little different that originally expected... And I've had more than a few of those.

Throughout the night and into this morning, however, the pain in my left buttock has increased, as has it's size.  There doesn't seem to be any bleeding, as my hemoglobin has stabilized, but it's getting larger.  The nurses are having a hard time managing my pain level as well this morning.  The morphine is working for about 45 minutes, but then fades quickly and the pain sets in fast.  Two mg every four hours doesn't seem to be doing the trick and we need to try something a little different.