Yayyyyyyyy finally got lyrica into me.

It had been over twenty four hours.

Of course I now realize I’m going to have escalating pain even long beyond now, until my blood levels of lyrica and trileptal stabilize back to normal.

Tonight is going to suck ass.

Both that, and the fact that I’ve had no acid reducers since yesterday and can’t hope to get any until late in the morning tomorrow when a staff person can swing by the hospital pharmacy.

Which leaves me at higher risk of a nasty aspiration tonight.

Which means I’m going to be chugging Mylanta as a substitute to at least take the pain down.

Because heartburn plus neuropathy, both enhanced by lack of meds? Hell on earth. Heartburn is heartburn, then neuropathy creates a giant halo of pain around it on both my stomach and my back.

I was so busy controlling nausea at the hospital, that I couldn’t even afford the luxury of thinking about pain, nor tolerate the only pain meds that work in an IV, but the moment I got home I felt it all over my body everywhere from head to toe, and will likely continue it until my body goes back to normal.

Then of course there’s the issue of whether I managed to miss enough seizure meds to cause seizures as well as out of control pain.

This is why I hate the ER.

But if I’d had to stay till Monday my pain would have gone even further out of control. There’s no IV equivalent to Lyrica, and the only meds they can give IV are terrible at neuropathic pain. It pisses me off that of all the seizure meds that control pain, they haven’t made a single one except Dilantin into IV form, and Dilantin is not the nicest pain med to other body parts.

Meanwhile there’s not even a liquid form of Lyrica, so it’s likely the medication that ended up progressively clogging my tube a little more each day they gave it to me. Which is what probably happened. They’re going to have me flush my tube with coke several times a day to keep the Lyrica from building up inside the tube. I had heard of Coke for getting rid of clogs after they form, but apparently if you do it all the time it clears out the tube before they have a chance to really grit onto the outside.

They said it looked like the clog had formed by thin layers building up over time until it completely clogged over. My guess is it was mostly Lyrica and leaving the feeding formula in until it had a chance to harden this morning was the last straw. So it wasn’t a kink but it was so thick it acted like one.

But I’ve got a new tube. And I had such a good anesthesiologist I didn’t even know they’d started the procedure until it was over. Apparently my threat of staying the weekend — which they didn’t want, in a big way — unless they could find me an anesthesiologist, paid off. They found me one, he used propofol, and I remember nothing of the procedure. Just starting to fog out a bit, then fogging back to normal, panicking and trying to tell them not to start the procedure, only to be told the procedure was already through.

I was glad when they finally told me that because my hands were restrained during the procedure and I was completely wigging out until they realized I thought they hadn’t started. I had thought they were holding my hands down and were going to do the procedure with my hands held down like last time. But it was really just some fairly gentle wrist restraints they probably used to keep me from grabbing the doctor if I woke up suddenly while they were still working.

But fuck. Pain. This is going to be a long night. But totally worth it, as far as being able to be home. And totally worth having a good anesthesiologist. He also told me he wouldn’t do what the previous ones did — lie to me and say I wouldn’t remember, or that I wouldn’t feel anything, because nobody can promise that ever with any kind of anesthesia. I thought this meant he’d be giving me the same kind of crap anesthesia. But it really meant that he was far more trustworthy than the nurse anesthetist they used before who was making all sorts of ridiculous claims to that effect, while I was screaming in pain. (“just a little more,” “you won’t remember this later”, “you’ll be asleep any second!”)

Oh and apparently the screaming, according to the anesthesiologist, means they also lied about giving me the meds until they started suppressing my breathing. Because if they’d been doing that, I wouldn’t have been screaming my head off.