Well, I am about to leave to go to the hospital to give blood for my blood tests, and I think a urine test also. These are pre-surgery tests they are doing to make sure I am healthy enough to have the surgery.

I’ve had my blood taken for these type of tests so many times in the past that it doesn’t bother me at all really. After this, my surgery will be this Friday.

Today is the one week mark before I have surgery to repair my hernia. I am actually looking forward to this because I really am looking forward to no longer having this thing. Of course, I am not looking forward to the few days of being sore though afterwards.

This will be my 3rd surgery, so I am not new to this whole ordeal. The only thing I do not like about having surgery is when they put that IV in you and start sending salt water (or whatever) into your veins. For some reason this really bothers me and is actually very painful (the water going in that is). Last time I actually almost passed out from it.

My first two surgeries were on my back to fix my scoliosis and the second was to remove a growth from my head.

Over the past couple weeks I have had to battle being sick.  I wrote on this earlier, so I’m just going to update you all on my condition.  If you want to know all the glory details, please refer back a few posts.

For the most part, my chest pain from my costochrondritis is gone, thank God.  I still occasionally have a little bit of tenderness that causes pain in my chest, but it is nothing like it was a few weeks ago when it was so bad I actually started to cry in pain.  My stomach is also not bothering me at all really anymore, and most importantly, no more diarrhea.

I also had some problems with my sinuses.  It felt like I had golf balls under my eyes because they were so swollen inside.  This has also went away.

My eyes seem to be getting a lot better also.  I was having some bad pain in my eyes and it was causing me headaches also.  They were very red on the sides and were very troublesome.  They are getting back to normal color now and I can see fine again…. Well, for the most part.  I do believe I have a slight issue in my right eye seeing things from a distance.  Mostly, I just can’t focus with that eye to read things far away like a road sign that I can see clearly with my left eye.

I think this means I might be ready for glasses and will probably go to the eye doctor sometime soon to have a checkup that I am, really, long overdue for.

My only issue now is I have a slight sore throat and it sometimes feels like I have something stuck in my throat which is also very annoying.  This has gotten better over the last couple of days though.

For the most part I seem to be back in good health, thank God.  My only obstacle now is my surgery next week on July 18th (a week from this coming Friday).  If you haven’t read or know already, I have a hernia that is going to be repaired.  This is an outpatient surgery and I should be back to normal after only a couple of days.

I will be sure to post probably right before my surgery and afterwards to say how it went.  This will be my third surgery I’ve had in my lifetime and I’m not really scared or nervous about it at all.  My first surgery was on my back to fix scoliosis.  The second was to remove a growth from my head.  This, my third, will be to fix a hernia.  Hopefully, this will be my last surgery I need for a long time.

Well, went back to the doctor today for a follow up on my previous one from last week.  Once again I have a new problem.  I think I am going to just start from the beginning and give you the whole story.

Last month I got really sick.  I didn’t feel like eating for days and was having severe stomach pain.  I thought it might have been related to my hernia that I have had for many years so I decided to tell the doctor about that.  That lead to me seeing surgeon who has scheduled me to have it surgically repaired on the 18th of July.

Anyways, sitting aside the hernia for now, when I was sick last month it led to them doing some x-rays because they thought it was my gallbladder.  Luckily, it ended up not being the problem, nor could they find any other reason.  After a few days I got better and pretty much just forgot about the whole episode.

Well, a couple weeks ago while sitting in church I started to feel sick again.  It wasn’t all that bad and I was able to sit through church despite it.  After church I seemed to be fine and didn’t feel sick again until Monday morning.  Then I started getting really sick.  In fact I didn’t eat for almost an entire week.  This led me to see the doctor which told me I had a viral infection and basically would just have to wait it out.  He told me if I was not better within a couple of days to come back.

I actually waited five days before going back because I still was not feeling good.  This time he ordered blood tests, stomach x-rays, stool samples, and a urine test. I complained to the doctor about diarrhea and chest pain so he gave me some Tylenol with codeine for the chest pain and something else for the diarrhea.

The doctor claimed my chest pain was probably from straining while coughing because of being sick, but I told him I had really not been coughing.  About a week later, and two or three days removed from taking the codeine, my chest pain started getting really bad again.  This time so bad I was crying.

I went to the doctor again that day because the chest pain was so bad and I told the doctor it was very sensitive to the touch.  He told me I have what they call costochrondritis, which is where the cartilage around my ribs and sternum become inflamed.  He gave me steroids, antibiotics, and xanax (to help calm me down from the pain).  For the most part, the steroids did a wonderful job of getting rid of the pain after a couple of days.

The doctor also ordered a EKG and a chest x-ray just to be sure it wasn’t anything more than costochrondritis that was causing me my pain.  Luckily for me, these tests came back good.  He told me prior to the tests that since the pain could be made worse by putting a little pressure on my chest that it wasn’t any internal organs, like my heart, causing it (although that is what I thought it was when I went in).

Well, today I went back for the follow up from last week.  Turns out now I have a sinus infection that is also causing my eyes to be a little blood shot.  So now I have been given prescriptions for eyedrops and more antibiotics to get rid of that.  This makes seven prescriptions that I have had in the last couple of weeks.

Basically most of this is just from a viral infection, but my costochrondirtis is something the doctor said today I may just have to live with.  He told me since my scoliosis that I have has my body all out of whack that it is probably going to cause off and on flare ups of my costochrondritis from time to time.  Luckily he said most of the time advil should alleviate it but I will probably end up back at the doctor again in the future needing steriods again for really bad flare ups.

This is also probably the reason I ended up in the ER about four months ago when I was having really bad chest pains.  So I am now kind of releived to know what is causing those.  Now I just have to hope this sinus infection goes away soon because it is really irritating.  Basically it is really swollen under my eye right now and feels like a golf ball is there or something.  Luckily though it feels more swollen that it actually is and is not really noticable unless you are looking for it.  The doctor told me that is normal that I would feel a lot more pressure, or swolleness, than is actually there.

I guess my next obstacle is my hernia surgery on the 18th of next month.  Hopefully I have no more reasons to go to the doctor before that.  Thankfully, all my tests I have had done came back negative for any thing, so although I have felt pretty miserable for the past couple weeks, I guess I am healthy and can thank God for that.

The only real bad thing about all of this is it caused me to miss almost two full weeks of school, and we just started a new quarter so I missed some pretty big weeks.  Hopefully I can make them up pretty easily.

Well, I went to the doctor yesterday to get surgery scheduled to fix a hernia that I have.  I’ve had this hernia for many years.  Not really sure how many years I have had it but I basically do not remember not having it.  Anyways, lately it has been causing a little bit of pain so I decided to finally tell someone about it and went to the doctor for it about a month ago.  He set an appointment for me with the surgeon for the 12th of this month (yesterday) to schedule surgery for it.

I will have it fixed on Friday July 18th of this year.  I have to be at the hospital at 7am and the surgery is at 9am.  I am actually sort of looking forward to getting this fixed as it will be nice to no longer have it.  The surgery is an outpatient surgery and the doctor said I would go home between 1-2 hours after I wake back up from it.  The surgery I guess takes around one hour to complete.

This will be my 3rd surgery so far.  My first surgery was in 2002 to fix my scoliosis.  I had another surgery in 2006 to remove a growth from my head.  Surgery doesn’t scare me at all really, especially since my major back surgery I had.  Nothing can be as bad as having back surgery (at least I don’t think).  The only thing I hate about surgery is the IV they stick up your arm.  For some reason I tend to not react well to those fluids (I think it is just salt water) being put in me.  Last time I had surgery I almost fainted when they started that IV.

Anyways, I am also starting to get over being sick.  I have been pretty sick with a viral infection (according to my doctor) over the past week.  Today I really ate for the first time since sunday (6 days ago).  I had a really bad stomach ache, headache, diarrhea, and chest pain.  The chest pain I guess was from the viral infection.  I was given tyolnol with codine to help get that away, which also helped get rid of the diarrhea.  Although, it actually just constipated me instead.

Well, that’s all for now.