Ashley’s ordeal
Around 11:00 this morning, Ashley called me from work saying she had been in severe pain all morning and was, at that point, keeled over in pain and had been lying down in one of the patient rooms for the past hour or so. She hurt so much she couldn’t even drive herself home. (She’s been having kidney stone issues for the past month or so, and the things won’t pass.)
I went to pick her up. We came home, she writhed in pain for a little bit. The pain got so bad it caused her to get really nauseous, and at around noon, she started throwing up…
And throwing up, and throwing up. We made an appointment with her doctor at UNLV, but the soonest they could get her in was 2:30. In the two hours between when she started puking and when we got her to the doctor, she had thrown up five or six times. Well, of course, she was really only throwing anything up the first two times.
So they stuck an IV in her to try to get her hydrated and put some anti-nausea drugs in her. It took them four different attempts to hit a vein because she was so dehydrated. And they gave her a shot to assuage the kidney stone pain.
Over the next hour she drifted in and out of sleep and went through two bags of IV fluid. By this time it’s nearing 5:00, and the UNLV health clinic is getting ready to shut down for the day. They’d like to release her, but she has thrown up a couple times since getting the anti-nausea drugs. So they start thinking maybe something else is wrong with her. They try twice to take blood samples but no blood will come out of her, due to dehydration.
She threw up one more time at around 5:30, and then the doctor/nursers are like, “Sorry, we have to recommend you go to the ER.”
The hospital they recommend is about a twenty-minute drive away from UNLV. And then we freaking waited forever in the waiting room to get into a so-called “emergency” room to be seen. Apparently there were more dire emergencies transpiring. Luckily, my parents and our friend Brittany came to wait with us, which helped alleviate some of the boredom. (Thanks, guys!)
This is where it finally started to get better, though. After sitting at the hospital for over an hour — and by this time, it’s been close to two hours since Ashley’s last puked — she started feeling a little better. We get her some juice, she drinks some, keeps it down. We’re still waiting in the waiting room. By now it was probably almost 8:00.
Ashley then decided we should just go home. She drank more juice, and we stopped to get some crackers. She came home and went straight to bed.
That was at about 8:30 tonight.
Hopefully the drugs will wear off during the night and she’ll wake up feeling mostly normal tomorrow.
With pain so bad it caused her to vomit almost continuously for several hours, and having to endure being stabbed with needles over a half a dozen times, Ashley has been a real champ today. I’m proud of her for being able to put up with it. But I hope she doesn’t have to go through that again.