Since my diagnosis, I have spent countless hours in hospital beds and emergency waiting rooms. In 2013, I was admitted 11 separate times for bowel obstructions. This is just one of my many accounts. I wrote this on my phone in October of 2014 while awaiting a hospital bed.
It is currently 3:17 AM and I write you from the comfy chairs of the Foothills Hospital emergency ward. I have an IV connected through my right forearm running saline solution. Nurses are coming back every 30 minutes to administer 10-20 mg of morphine just to keep me from an excruciating pain through my lower stomach and intestines that penetrates through my entire lower back. There is no comfortable position, whether I am curled up in a ball or lying down, nothing seems to give relief. The only thing I can think of to describe what this pain feels like is how I think giving birth would feel like. It seems the pain comes through in intense waves, feeling like my stomach is a brown paper lunch bag with someone squeezing all the air out, with every bit of strength in their body. Every wave takes away my breath and I feel helpless and alone as no one can understand what I am going through. The worst part was trying to move from the car into the emergency waiting room. I moved slowly but I collapsed multiple times on the short 50 meter walk, almost passing out from pain. Although this time may seem bad, I have had much worse. I’ve shown up to the hospital covered in my own vomit as my body tries to clear the blockage. So far so good… I’ve been doing my best to hold off throwing up all over the place. The thought of school crosses my mind in between intense waves of pain. I wonder how long they’re going to keep me here this time and how I’m going to submit my surficial geology lab that’s due at 11AM this morning. I always try to tell my self – everything will work out. I try to keep myself from stressing about missing the 11 hour school day that starts in 4 hours, but it never really helps.
Currently I am very nauseous. I am not sure if it is a side effect of the morphine or my body’s response to the blockage, or both. The nurse administers a slow drip of Zophran which reduces some of the nausea and I finally fall into a short morphine nap in between pain waves.
My name is Troy Parsons and this is my journey while battling Crohn’s Disease.
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