home from the hospital

Well things have been a little crazy here at the Cassidy house...

Some of you knew (most of you had no idea) that Karen went to the last hospital Tuesday night via ambulance. Well after lots of tests and blood work they diagnosed her with pancreatitis, gall stones, and a kidney infection. Wednesday morning around 3am she was admitted into the hospital and put on some pretty heavy pain killers and a strict ice chips only diet.

Thursday she had surgery and they removed her gall bladder (one of the stones had been blocking her common bile duct and causing the pancreas to become inflamed). They said that this will keep her from having any more similar episodes. She was feeling better on Friday until we had a "hiccup" with the pain medication. Karen's mom had noticed some welts on her legs around 10am Friday...at 11am they gave her the first dose of oral pain meds (Percoset sp?)...we noticed some more bumps show up and called the nurse. The nurse (unknown to us) called the doctor, told him what happened and had Karen taken off the Percoset....one small problem...when she was supposed to get the next dose of pain meds at 3pm and Karen called the nurse, the nurse had nothing to give her. She didn't think to ask the doctor what she should give Karen instead of the Percoset and since she didn't tell us...we didn't have the chance to ask that question ourselves. So...here she was at 3pm with the pain meds starting to wear off...at 4pm we still don't have any pain meds (b/c it takes over an hour for a doctor to call in a script, the pharmacy to get it and the nurse to get it)...finally Karen gets some medication (Vicadin) around 4:30 (by this time she was in so much pain she was crying). After all of this happened Karen had a relapse and had to go back to the ice chips diet.

So Saturday she started eating clear liquids (yum..jello), and Sunday Karen was actually feeling better and eating soft foods. However, her labs that they took every morning kept coming back with high numbers, so the doctor's wouldn't let her go home. Monday they did an MRI to see if the reason the labs were coming back high was because of stones that had escaped and were still hanging out causing problems.

Finally, Tuesday morning when the surgeon did his rounds he said enough is enough. The labs are still elevated but he wanted to send Karen home anyways. She has 3 follow-up visits with 3 different doctors that in the next 2 weeks, but at least she's home. :-)