Monday, May 4, 2009

surived!

I survived the lithotripsy.

All in all it was...eh. Honestly I found the BMB to be 100% more tolerable, but I do wonder if he have different tolerances for different types of pain. In my case, having needles stuck into my hip is far more preferable than being punched in the kidney a couple hundred times.

The anesthesia part went about as well as could be expected. Due to the nature of my masto, my urologist was adamant that the head of urologic anesthesia be the doctor to work with me. While he had never had a masto patient before, he'd worked with enough at risk groups in enough risky situations that he would be the best to be there if things went wrong. The only things that went wrong were that they were supposed to have IV Benadryl and IV Zantac has prophylactic pushes, however both ended up containing an unknown preservative, so they were moved to emergency pushes, along with steroids and epi.

For the procedure itself I was given a benzo (i forget which one) and a few micrograms of Fentanyl, which is generally tolerated ok by Mast Cell patients. Thankfully it was tolerated just fine by me, and while it was a teeny dose, it totally helped as I found the procedure to be really uncomfortable.

Post op was a fucking disaster, where some idiot resident wrote my post op scripts without reading my chart as every single one of them was on my list of drugs to be avoided. That meant I got to spend an additional 4-6 hours hanging around waiting for them to find someone who could write replacement scripts and to discharge me. My post op scripts ended up being Augmentin and Flomax (they were originally Cipro-which has caused long lasting tendon problems in me and Percocet - which i am allergic to)

1 day on the Flomax and I realized that was not for me. It helps you urinate (which I obviously need to do since I need to pass whatever was in my kidney) but it also lowers your blood pressure, which is something I did not feel comfortable with. Unless totally necessary, taking drugs that can markedly lower your BP aren't the best thing in the world since they can adversely effect epinephrine, should you need to administer it. Plus it made me woozy and cranky. The Augmentin is also making me feel pretty crummy, but I only have 1 more dose to go on that.

In 2 weeks I go for xrays and figure out if I need another procedure done or what. rad.