I got an endoscopy and a stomach + small intestine biopsy early Thursday morning. For those of you who don’t know, that is where they shove a big camera down your throat and take pictures of your throat/ stomach/ and small intestine. Then they cut peices out to look at under a microscope later. I haven’t been feeling very well and I have been extremely overwhelmed and busy lately or I would have written about everything leading up to this a lot sooner. They were supposed to do it laast friday, the 14th but I had taken some advil and they were afraid it would cause me to bleed too much during the biopsy.
I was afraid it would be really painful and scary but it was actually neither. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight which is no big deal, but it was hard not to drink water in the middle of the night when my mouth was really dry. They gave me an IV which was the only painful part of the whole thing, and once I was wheeled into the procedure room, they sprayed my mouth and throat with lidocane which was incredibly nasty tasting but it made EVERYTHING go numb. After that, they said they were injecting me with the sedative and the next thing I remember is waking up in another room with Chris and Alex sitting by me. They took out my IV, gave me a drink and started telling me about what I was not allowed to do for the next 12 hrs.
Apparently the drug they gave me was in the xanex family, but a lot stronger, so I was pretty out of it. I wasn’t allowed to drive at all until the next day, not allowed to cook (they were afraid I would forget I was cooking and catch the house on fire :), hahaha!), or be alone just in case. The medicine wasn’t that bad, I was just a little woozy and I slept pretty much the whole rest of the day. I started to feel like myself again that night around 8ish. They told me to take it easy and to "limit travel" whatever the heck that means, because of the biopsy, which was fine with me since I wasn’t exactly able to get up and go anywhere anyway. The only side effect of the procedure that I could tell was a pretty sore and achey stomach for the rest of the day, which they said would be normal.
They found a few interesting things during the endoscopy. I won’t get the results from the actual biopsys for 3-7 days, but here is what I already know: in addition to the acid reflux that I have been taking prescription prilosec for, I have something called bile reflux. I never even knew there was such a thing but apparently the bile goes from my small intestine to my stomach through something sort of like a leaky valve type thing. I was half asleep when this was explained to me so I am still a little uncertain about this part. The Dr. said it wasn’t something that can be fixed with diet and that pretty much the only treatment is medicine and surgery. Fun, right? Supposedly bile relfux is almost always accompanied by acid reflux, which makes sense and that explains a lot of my stomach pain.
He prescribed me two weeks worth of Nexium and said that if that didn’t work to help with the pain, he would have to prescibe something stronger. Hopefully the purple pill will work. :) He also found some "erosions" on my stomach, which are basically just little ulcers all over it, which ALSO explains the pretty much constant pain in my stomach. It also explains why coffee has been almost impossible for me to drink anymore, among other things. He said that could have easily been caused by the acid and taking advil, asprin or ibueprofen too much. I have been taking advil about once a week because of my migranes when the imitrex and Tylenol aren’t helping. Guess I will have to talk to my doctor about finding something else since I am no longer allowed to take any NSAIDs.
It will be interesting to see what the biopsy reveals, and in the meantime I have some lovely pictures of what looks like a slime filled swimming pool (the bile in my tummy), and some pretty white spots all over a shiny pink thing (the erosions). I don’t have a scanner anymore or I would probably upload them and subject you to them, hahaha! Lucky you...