1:30am January 20, 2015

I should not take NSAIDs.

I just took a low dose of ibuprofen twice over the weekend, hoping it would keep down any swelling around my bruised rib.

Bad idea.

How many of you remember this going around tumblr:

“Remember to drink lots of water because your insides are a swampy bog and a watershortage would affect the local frog population.”

Don’t click past the “Read More” unless you’re okay with semi-graphic descriptions of bile and blood. Long story short:  I’m bleeding more, therefore even a child’s dose of ibuprofen isn’t going to cut it.

Well I’d been calling the stuff I drained from my stomach pond scum for years.  And I have a stomach bleed that mostly these days manifests in the form of blood clots showing up in the burp cup or the drainage bags. 

The blood clots tend to come out of the tube long and straight because thats’ the way the tube is shaped, then when they’re out, they curl in on themselves.

We already had a name for them, because of what a staff person exclaimed when she first saw one. But we realized that she had a problem with the filter between her brain and her mouth.  And she and I talked about it, and decided that this one time, she’d come up with something that could be truly offensive and hurtful, or bring back bad memories, for some people. So we decided not to use that term.

And this was after the “swampy bog” comment.  I’d, as i said, been calling my stomach fluids “pond scum” for ages.  They aren’t always looking like pond scum, but there are times when it’s murky and green and looks exactly like something you’d pull off the top of a pond.

So naturally (or, naturally to a group of people with a really weird sense of humor) the blood clots became “frogs”.  That’s a polite term you can say in front of nearly anyone without offending them or bringing back bad memories.  (Trust me, the old term was bad.  Funny if you like your humor ridiculously off-color, but still not remotely polite in mixed company, meaning anyone you don’t know really well.)

Anyway, after the ibuprofen, the frog population increased so that it was filling entire layers of the burp cup.  We couldn’t even count them, there were so many.  It wasn’t like I was hemorrhaging or anything, it wasn’t unsafe, but it wasn't good, either.

I don’t think this bodes well, though, for my ability to handle plasmapheresis without it making my stomach bleed too much.  They’re going to scope me and see what exactly the bleed looks like and whether I’ll be able to handle the blood thinners during plasmapheresis.

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