Hello all! Thought I would drop in and give you a rundown of my last week. I got home from a particularly long shift, with a stressful call at the end of it on Monday morning. I began to feel "keyed up"....got tearful....yada yada yada....I decided to try to take a nap around noon or so. At three in the afternoon, I started having some chest pain that radiated into my left shoulder and down my left arm. I started getting nauseated. I was blaming everything on my high anxiety level....tried to shake it off for a little over an hour. Hubby called between bus routes and I told him what was going on. He asked me what I needed to do, and I told him that it was probably just anxiety, but that if I were a patient of mine, I would recommend getting checked out. We went to the local ER where they didn't find anything wrong with my heart, but had some other concerns, so they transferred me to the larger hospital in the city. To make a long story a little shorter....we all knew there was some wrong with me, but none of the tests were definitive for anything......it took days, and many tests later to figure out I had a bad gall bladder. They removed it yesterday and sent me home this morning...feeling much better! The pain from surgery is better than the way I was feeling before. We won't be surprised if we figure out that this had "poisoning" my system for quite some time....and that some of my other issues may be directly tied to this! Time will tell about that.
As stressful as this past week has been, I am so thankful that I chose to stop smoking 38 days ago. I can't imagine the added stress of going through the withdrawals while going through this hospital stay! There is absolutely no smoking anywhere on any hospital property in Missouri, so it would not have been pleasant. I'm thankful I could focus on my true symptoms, diagnosis, and now recovery without the addition of nicotine withdrawal....It was also fantastic to be able to answer the question "are you a smoker" with "no, I quit x days ago". Everyone was supportive and told me how fantastic that was! I've also been told that by being a non-smoker, my recovery time could be as little as half the time of a smoker!
Stay true to your quits, you'll never know when the benefits will enter your life!
{{{HUGS}}}
Lisa
