I hope I put this in the correct forum and if not, sorry Mods.
My Mom called me today to tell me Dad is sick (he’s 60 and relatively healthy) He woke up last night with severe pain in his lower right side and it continued on until morning. He has a fever, a headache and threw up this morning. He went to the doctor and the doctor did some blood tests but has not told them if anything has shown up on them. He’s due for a CaT scan in an hour to see if anything shows up there.
The doc ruled out kidneys because the pain is toward the front, ruled out liver because the pain was too low and my Dad no longer has a gallbladder or appendix. The doc also doesn’t feel it’s his intestines because the pain is located where there is only a tiny bit of intestine.
I’ve about chewed my fingernails to the knuckle with worry and we will “maybe” find out something late this evening. They told Mom that they would call if they find something “troubling.” Whatever that means.
Anyone have any theories as to what could be happening to him?
Disclaimer. I am not using any responses as a barnyard method to diagnose my Dad. He is seeking professional medical advice…yada yada
But statistically speaking, the odds are against it. it’s more likely to be one of these:
Those are all links on the original website, BTW, if you want more info on them.
Well, I guess we can rule out the ovarian/uterine stuff, so except for the possibility of spinal disc disease or shingles (is he having diarrhea?), that leaves…basically the whole Irritable Bowel Syndrome constellation. As for his having “only a tiny bit of intestine there”, your intestines can move around quite a bit from where the pretty textbook illustrations say they oughta be. Crohn’s sufferer here, and I know whereof I speak. Is the doctor a GP? A family practitioner might not have had a lot of experience with IBS patients–can you get a GI man in for a consultation?
I’m rather uneasy at hearing that your doctor is dismissing a whole host of things it could be just because “he only has a tiny bit of intestine there”. As I said, yer guts ain’t always where you think they are. During the months before I had a bowel resection for my Crohn’s, just that precise location–the lower right quadrant, right down in the hollow of my pelvis by my hip and pubic bone–would give me the most amazing pain whenever I ate something high-fiber like coleslaw. And yeah, that’s where you have “only a tiny bit of intestine”, where the small intestine empties into the colon on the pretty textbook illustrations. Thing was, I also had a whacking big chunk of scar tissue from the Crohn’s there, which was blocking traffic and causing me pain.
Also, I knew a woman many years ago who died of an impacted colon, who also had weird abdominal pain that wasn’t diagnosed as an impacted colon until too late. She threw up, too. (She was developmentally disabled, which didn’t help her communication skills to tell her caretaker that she hadn’t had a BM for days.) How long since your dad’s last BM? Do you even know a way to ask him that?
There is also a thing called “referred pain”, which means that sometimes where it hurts isn’t where it’s messed up. Just FWIW.
From everything I’ve heard about sponges being left in patients, the patients experience severe pain from it right away. I don’t think a sponge could have been left in for eight months without his noticing it. I don’t know what a hemostat is.
I thought about a few of those things on that list and I agree with you that it’s odd that a doc would dismiss things because of where he thinks the intestines ought to be. Hopefull the CaT scan will reveal something.
My dad did have a BM last night (I just asked him directly ie. “Have you been able to shit?”
He had one yesterday evening and another today. He said it was normal.
One thing I forgot to mention, my dad does have diverticulosis and I wondered if he didn’t have a flare up or possibly an abcess from something getting stuck in the diverticuli. I’m going to assume that if the CaT scan doesn’t reveal anything that he’ll get a colonoscopy. He just had one in March or April and all was well.
Well, “diverticulitis” was actually the first thing that popped into my head as soon as you said “pain-in-lower-side-of-abdomen-but-not-appendicitis-plus-he-threw-up”, because vomiting tends to go along with a diverticulitis flareup, but there are other things it could’ve been, too.
I’d at least mention the pre-existing diverticulosis to the sawbones. Sometimes doctors get so wrapped up in looking for “the oddball syndrome”, or in their own field of specialty, that they ignore something obvious.
Doctors are not God, ya know. You’re permitted to second-guess them aloud without fear of being struck by lightning.
And this particular doctor may not be familiar with diverticulosis/diverticulitis, or he may simply be wrong in dismissing the possibility because of “where the intestines are”. There was a Doper just last week whose pediatrician told her that the reason her baby had diarrhea was because lactose from the milk she (the mom) was drinking was getting in her bloodstream and thus her breast milk, and thus giving the baby lactose-intolerance diarrhea. Which is stupid.
Just because a person is an M.D. doesn’t make him infallible, or automatically “non-stupid”. Tell him about the diverticulosis. And if he says dismissively, “Oh, I don’t think it could be that…” ask him directly, “Why not?”
Sometimes our aged parents need us to go to bat for them in the face of intimidating, officious medicos.
Thanks Duck. Well, after spending 9 1/2 hours in the ER all they know so far is that the ileum is inflamed (no abcess though, phew!) They said it’s unlikely it’s a diverticulitis flare-up and they think it’s most likely ulcerative colitis, or Crohn’s (possible but not likely says ER doc) He was admitted and they’re doing more tests but he won’t know course of treatment for another few hours when another doc gets there.
It’s likely they will just treat the inflamation with meds w/o doing any exploratory surgery. Let’s hope. He is feeling better this morning after having anti-fungals and antibiotics pumped into him all night. Bad news for one of the docs because that means he has the energy to go off on her for not signing the admit for 9 1/2 hours. :mad:
