I Don't Have A Vaganus, I'm Just Part Cow

I had an MRI last week after finding some ulcers. Turns out, I don't have fistulas. Awesome. There were no traces of Crohn's in my bowels. Good deal, guts. What I do have, is a blood clot in my pelvis.  Better?  Meh. The only documented sighting of a clot in this particular vein [the Perivaginal vein], was in a cow.

A cow.

Really?

Okay.  So now that I've had some time for it to sink in that I'm up against something we don't know anything about, I can gather my wits and go into this situation without any expectations. My Doctors explained that this clot:

 a.) could have been there for quite some time, and we are only finding it now because I had an MRI for something else and we'd stumbled upon it entirely accidentally.

 b.) could have been caused by the other ulceration and freaked my body out, resulting in my blood flipping it's shit. 

or c.) formed as a result of my simply having an autoimmune disease. Score.

The other thing is that the clot itself seems to be smaller than it would originally had to have been to cause me the pain that I was having.  When Dr. Flier thought that I had fistulas, she put me on two antibiotics (Flagyl & Cipro).  They seemed to do the trick in keeping my pain at bay, but they were also probably helping the swelling in the area of the clot, maybe even shrinking it. Bonus. 

After my MRI, Dr. Flier ordered my admission to the hospital because the best thing at the time was to have more labs done and monitor what was going on.  I stayed at Beth Israel from Thursday to Saturday, with false hope of leaving earlier. Always happens to me. I was told that after much deliberation, without many facts, that our 'team' had a few options in dealing with this small terror.

If I had a rectal examination and blood was found, anti-coagulation treatment was a big no no.  Blood thinning is dangerous for any patient, but for a Crohn's Patient- it is downright stupid. We're already big time bleeders. If I did not have evidence of blood or any ulceration after a rectal exam, I would have the option to start a 24-hour, intravenous drip of a specific blood thinning drug as a  first step. If I hemorrhaged, we would stop treatment immediately and I would be fine.  Here's the scary part...

If I did fine on that medication, I would be given the okay to go home with some pills and an anti-coagulation treatment that would involve injecting myself in the stomach twice a day with a blood-thinner, just under the skin. HA. Right. Like I'd be able to do this myself. As if that isn't creepy enough, I would run the risk of bleeding anyway, and because this medication would stay in my system for 24 hours- I would have to go back to Beth Israel, and receive a blood transfusion. 

Yikes.  I'll choose secret option 3. To monitor this by MRI. That way, these Doctors can document the case study and give answers to other women who discover a clot in the Perivaginal Vein. We'll see what happens after tomorrow's scan. At least while I'm in that horrific tube, the girls in the booth give me headphones and play music through them. Hip Hop, please. I can still hear those awful buzzing sounds, though... and try like hell not to move when the loud ones scare me.

I did have some laughs this weekend. This emergency room, as well as the Stoneman building and the staff of both have become familiar to me, and I'm educated enough about my disease to ask the right questions and give the right answers.

I highly recommend inserting an IV into the middle of your arm.  Less discomfort and you can barely tell it's there. Stings a teeny bit more, but I promise, it's worth it.

Party in tha ambahlaaance. I've worked with this EMT like 3 times. This time, I actually made him laugh. 

My amazing Mom to the rescue.  She comes up when I'm sick and always knows how to keep me smiling.  Here she is doing it in our SINGLE room! No idea how we pulled that off.

Saved By The Bell in my room? Yes, please... I don't have cable in the Hobbit House.

Or Room Service for that matter... If you think Hospital food sucks, you haven't had BIDMC grub.

This is the diagram of what's going on with my Pelvic Blood Clot.  Dr. Caleb Hale gave me very specific details of the location, and severity of the damn thing.  And he was an awesome communicator, who took the time to ask my opinion and answer my plethora of questions without growing impatient with me. He got my trust. That's huge.

And there's no chance I could have left a whiteboard white. 

Every night that I go to sleep with this disease, I remind myself that the sun will rise again. Even on Stoneman 5.


Moo.