Health updates

Before Christmas I started getting terrible pain just above my left knee.  It felt like a combination of burning and a torn muscle.  The pain started on a Friday and by Sunday I couldn't stand it any more and went to the Insta-care.  The doctor came up with no reason as to what it was or why it was hurting and sent me home.  On Wednesday the pain was still there but now red spots started showing up.  I called my Internal Medicine doctor and they got me in on the following day, Thursday.  My doctor listened to me and before he even looked at my leg he said it sounded like Shingles.  Sure enough, I had shingles.  He prescribed me a lot of pain medicines and really prepared me for the worse.  He said it lasts around 30 days and is caused by chicken pox.  If you get chicken pox it remains dormant in your spine and on occasion it will resurface in the form of shingles.  It comes from your spine and follows a nerve around your body.  Mine wrapped around my hip and down to my knee.  I was really expected to be in a ton of pain, but I had very little problems except a little itching.  My doctor said it wasn't contagious.  I have heard of 3 other people in our neighborhood getting it since I did though.  It lasted exactly 30 days and then was gone.  I did get a few red bumps, but after a few weeks they all disappeared. 

In February my dermatologist took a sample of this thing on my check and sent it off for lab testing.  It came back as cancerous.  My doctor didn't want to go in and cut it out so we tried a chemotherapy cream on it.  It first looked like it was getting much worse and I started getting nervous, but Dr. Curtis said that was normal and it was working.  After I came off of the cream it started healing and besides a little discoloration of the area you can hardly tell there was anything there at all. 

On a Thursday in May I work up at 3:00 a.m. with horrible stomach cramping.  It felt like horrible menstrual cramping, but was constant.  I took a lortab and tried going back to sleep.  The pain was so bad that I felt like I was going to throw up.  After a couple of hours of sweating and moaning and groaning Allen went and got me another Lortab.  He was so good and went to work late so he could get the kids off the school for me.  Around noon he came home to check on me.  After seeing how I looked and felt he took me to the Insta-care.  The doctors there couldn't do much for me and sent me up the ER at LDS hospital.  They ran tests and came back with nothing.  They said that the tip of my appendix was inflamed and that could be causing the pain, but it would be getting worse and I was actually starting to feel better.  Or, they said it could be that I had cysts on my ovaries that ruptured.  So, they pretty much didn't know what to do with me.  A few hours later I was sent home and was told to come back up the next morning to re-do all the tests again.  Everything looked better the next day and I just tried to take it easy over the weekend.  I am a medical mystery.

My Ulcerative Colitis seems to be in remission and we are going to do another colonscopy on July 6th to make sure everything is looking alright.  I hate the prep for that!