Year of Pain

Skip this one if you are bored or grossed out by medical stuff.

I am not exaggerating. It's now December, and I am still having pain. Let me backtrack to early January 2006 when I went to see my GP. I had been having pain in my upper left abdomen almost daily, so I figured I had an ulcer or something. She diagnosed stress-related gastritis and gave me a prescription to reduce my stomach acid. Hmph. I was a bit taken aback by that diagnosis. Knew I'd had a tough year but couldn't imagine that I'd been THAT stressed out.

No real improvement by the end of January and was due to go back to the GP in early February. Went out for dinner to a local restaurant with the pod on a Saturday night. Woke up in the wee hours with my guts on fire with an intense pain I'd never experienced in my life. Didn't know what was wrong but I knew I had to go to the hospital. Being me, the girl who doesn't know how to ask for help, I didn't wake up my roommate or phone a friend. I put my clothes on and walked to Eyre Square to the taxi queue and asked the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. So off I went to the Regional Hospital emergency room. Pain was bad but bearable by then. I saw the triage nurse, and since I wasn't looking like I would expire on the spot, was sent back to the waiting room. I think that visit took about 6 and a half hours. The resident who saw me, figured since the pain was on the left side, that it was gastritis, like my own GP had diagnosed. Great. The pain had pretty much subsided by that time, so I was sent home. Spent most of Sunday recovering.

Went to work on Monday as usual. Monday night, woke up again in the wee hours, this time, I felt like someone had taken a giant sickle and was cutting my torso in half. The pain was unbelievable. It was all the way around my sides and back and across my entire upper abdomen with fire spreading in every direction. Now I was on the verge of tears and really hurting. Even though I was told to call her no matter what time it was, I didn't want to wake up Stephanie or my roommate, so again, I took myself to the hospital. Silly me. I was barely holding it together when I checked in. While I was waiting to see the triage nurse, I had to make a fast stumble to the bathroom where I sat for a good 10 minutes panting and pale, not sure if I was gonna throw up or faint. Didn't do either in the end. Finally saw the triage nurse, but even being that ill wasn't enough to get me a bed. I was stuck in the waiting room. I couldn't sit. I couldn't read. It was very uncomfortable to lie down, but it was the only thing I could do, I was in so much pain and so tired at the same time. It was the longest night of my life. I finally was taken in to see a doctor after waiting about 10 hours. I was still in pain but much less so by then. I was drained. I asked for saline because I felt so dehydrated. The resident was different, a woman this time. She looked at my chart, saw my age, took a look at me, and said "You've got gall stones." Apparently, I fit the bill for the perfect gall stone candidate - fair, fat, 40, and female. She said that the pain was referring, not unusual. She gave me a prescription for something that would stop the pain if I had another gall bladder attack, and wrote up a referral for the local hot shot surgeon (consultant).

I went to see my own GP later that day to get things sorted and update her on the new diagnosis.

I had to wait almost a month to see the consultant. People tell me this is fast. While waiting to see him, I had another gall bladder attack, but the pills helped stop it. I was put on a restricted, ultra lean diet, but I was still in pain almost every day.

I switched to private coverage so I could get surgery faster because I didn't want to wait a year for this to end! I had to wait another month to have an ultrasound and gastroscopy. I have to say that Bon Secours has one of the best day case units ever. It was confirmed that I had a gall stone, not a big one, but big enough. It only takes one. Two days later, I got a call that there was a spot open for surgery the following week, so the Monday before Easter weekend, I went back into Bon Secours to have my gall bladder removed. It was an interesting two days in the hospital. I've discovered the best thing there - not morphine, no no, OXYGEN! Yeah, give me a mask full of that any day. Ahhhhh.

So, blah blah, recovered from surgery, still eating carefully, had lost about 24 pounds in 3 months, was still scared to eat anything fat, rich, yummy. Was told I would be able to eat whatever I wanted the day after surgery. Hasn't quite turned out that way.

For about a month, I was feeling pretty good, but by June, I was having discomfort on my left side again and had developed some other post-surgery problems that were relatively minor but unpleasant (bunch of hair fell out, and other fun stuff).

Went to the GP 4 times over a 3-month period, until finally I was sent back to the consultant. He sent me for a CT scan of my organs (liver, spleen, pancreas, kidneys), which all showed as normal. So, what to do, what to do? Can't find anything wrong with me, but I'm still having pain every bloody day. Hurts if I eat, hurts if I don't eat.

In the Terryland mall is a little Chinese herbal shop where they have doctors trained in traditional Chinese medicine. I'd tried everything Western allopathic medicine could offer, so I decided to give Eastern medicine a go. I've spent close to €1000 over the last 9 weeks and had acupuncture, cupping, and massage along with the herbal tea, which I have to brew and drink twice a day. It's pretty miserable-tasting stuff too, as the folks at the shop will attest. I have one treatment left and then I'm stopping because I have run out of money. It has helped a little bit but not completely, and I don't know what will happen once I stop drinking the tea. Last week was really great, only a couple of days with any pain, but this week was crap, with pain every single day. So Eastern medicine has not been able to help either.

So, the year of pain continues. But it hasn't slowed me down much. I went to Italy and Canada in May, Germany for work then a tour of County Kerry in July, Scotland in October, and Sweden in November. I have lost 30 pounds, gone down two dress sizes, started yoga, swing dancing, and horse riding. I wore a sexy red dress to the office Christmas party and danced with a very nice man who's probably 20 years younger than me - and I loved every minute of it - even when he stepped on my foot!

The Honeymoon Phase

People will tell you that the first year in a new country is the best time - exciting, challenging, different. What they forget to tell you is how lonely it will be. When I first moved to Ireland, it WAS exciting, challenging, and different. But, I didn't have my cats, I didn't have easy access to my friends or family except when I went to a talk shop to use the phone. I didn't have the comfort of my personal belongings around me. I didn't have the familiarity of my daily routine and the life I'd led in Vancouver for 13 years.

What I ALSO didn't have was the restrictions and limitations imposed by myself, my former life, and other people who knew me as being a certain way, based on years of the same behaviours, thoughts, beliefs, and habits. I had a chance to start fresh and reinvent myself as much as I dared.

I was in a rut and felt myself getting more afraid of life and becoming set in my ways. I needed to shake the tree. Galway City on the west coast of Ireland has been a place of much tree shaking.

Almost the second I set foot in Ireland, I started losing some of the excess weight I had been carrying around since I moved to Vancouver. No TV dinners here! I still get annoyed by the bar fridge-sized fridges that are the standard in most apartments. The ice box takes up 1/4 of the space, so there's not a lot you can keep in there. On the plus side, I eat fresher food more often because I can't store a lot of stuff.

I arrived in Galway at the beginning of June with my big suitcase and other bags of clothes and shoes. Stayed at a B&B for a few days. One of the down sides of moving to Ireland BEFORE getting a job is that I paid my own way. If the company I work for had hired me while I was still in Canada, I would have been given a bit of help with moving and accommodation. But they wouldn't have paid to ship me over. They were only hiring locally. Oh well. C'est la vie. It was a gamble moving without a job, but it paid off.

I stayed at the University's student residences up Newcastle Road for about 10 days. The night before I moved out, the boys upstairs left the kitchen tap running all night into a full, plugged sink, which leaked water through the ceiling into my bedroom in the wee hours!

I moved into the granny flat (converted garage) in Claddagh which was to be my first hovel, I mean home, in Galway. I nicknamed the flat "The Shoebox" because it was long and narrow and had a dividing wall down the middle between the living room/bedroom space and kitchen. The bathroom had an electric shower that was so small I had to squeeze into the corner opening sideways. The power box for it was in the kitchen by the outside door - 7 feet up the wall - I measured it! I had to use a stool to turn the power on and off. The place was so damp, even in the middle of July, that less than 3 weeks after my stuff arrived, my vitamins were moldy. Yuck! And I had far more 8-legged guests than I could stand. I stayed 3 months there, then broke the lease and moved into an apartment at the docks in Galway's city centre.

A drier apartment with a roomier shower, but I now had to acquire a roommate since I couldn't afford to live there on my own. Now, I had not lived with anyone for more than 15 years, so it was a helluva shock to the system. My roommate was a Canadian guy, nice enough, but it turned out he was a serious smoker. He fibbed about that. He paid his rent and bills on time and was quiet, but we didn't really click as roommates, so he moved out after a few months.

The apartment was nicer looking but badly built as so many things are here. I had to take a lot of time off work to let in guys to repair leaks in sinks, doors that didn't hang/close right, immersion heater timer, water pump, window lock. The worst thing was the window in my bedroom. The flashing (thing that keeps rain off the window frame) had come off the window frame sometime in the months before I moved in. Because the frame (wood, oh so practical in Galway) kept getting wet, it rotted. The window was on the verge of falling out, so the guy who came to fix it, nailed it open a crack because he couldn't close it all the way for fear of breaking the frame, and covered the gap with packing tape. I spent the winter with my window open like that. Brrr! Big heating bills, and I was still cold. Whine and moan.

Yeah, so who cares, right? I started my job as a technical writer, and I was in heaven! Spent my days talking about grammar and punctuation. Haggled over words and definitions. Wrote and edited documents. And I finally made some friends. Other writers like me who had moved to Galway for the job and were making a fresh start in a new place. A little social pod developed including a cinema club, book exchange, and regular weekend activities like hanging at the pub or going dancing.

I had my birthday in Italy, a two-week trip to Germany in July for work, and a trip to France in November. For Christmas, two cool gals made the hike to the wilds of western Ireland from England and Italy, and we had a girls' long weekend for the holidays.

But all was not well. In the new year, I started having a recurring ache in my upper left abdomen. So began the year of pain. Very cryptic, non?