Here It Goes Again.

My boyfriend is in the hospital. Again. This is the second time in the past week he has been incapacitated. Again, I am terrified, for no real reason. His condition is not life-threatening at this point, and he is where he can best be helped. Yet I am still unable to sleep yet again, and eating is a far more complicated thing than it needs to be. But, I digress. I will start at the beginning and work my way forward.

When his mom first gave him my number, he did not call me straight away. He was admitted to the hospital before he had the chance for intense pain in his abdomen. He was "violently ejecting everything from both ends." They just gave him some pain meds at this point and sent him home, citing indigestion as the problem. I did not hear from him for nearly a month after that. Last Saturday I ended up having to work instead of going to hang out with him right away. I was expecting a phone call around 11:30, after he gets off work as is usual. Standing in my kitchen at 8:30, my phone vibrates and screams at me, and it is him on the other end. I made a joke about him calling me early and he made a weak joke about it being bed-time, moving onward to ask me inane questions about how my day went, completely ignoring me when I shot questions back to him. I, of course, made a comment with a giggle about him ignoring me. He responded with a stutter and weak explanation. He was in the ER, the pain he had before we met was back.

He was admitted that night, and an MRI on Monday revealed gallstones to be the culprit. Some of them having migrated to the bileduct, they put him under for an endoscopic procedure to remove those before a complete gallbladder removal on Tuesday. One, however, was left behind with a shunt. It had become embedded, and there was too much swelling and infection to do anything about it at that point. Tuesday they did end up removing the gallbladder, and said that 3/4 of the organ was stone, and it was infected nearly to the point of gangrene. How he did not feel this, everyone is mystified. Regardless, he was allowed to leave Thursday.

I was with him every moment I could be Thursday and Friday, and he was getting better rapidly. I was sure he was on the mend. I had to work Saturday, and by the time I got home and called him, he was in the ER again and in rather copious amounts of pain. He asked me to come see him. When I got there, he was alone, and seemed fairly well. In pain, yes, but he was dealing with it. He was happy to see me. The doctor came in and was talking to him about the issues, asking questions about the pain. She laid him down to feel his abdomen, and sat him back up as she left. You could see it on his face. It was all over. From that point on, all he could do was lay there, sweating and shaking, blinking his eyes open to frown at me every once in a while. There were tests, and a liter of liquid to dump down his throat. He cried and grunted at times, but for the most part he was silent and sweating. The pain meds they gave him barely helped at all, and by the time he was admitted and I left, he was pale and silent.

As it turns out, the shunt had slipped, blocking the bileduct and building pressure once again. All I want to do is scream at the doctors, to help him feel better. But, they are doing the best they can do, and there is nothing I can do to change that, or to help him. I hate this. I just want him better, I want things to go back to normal. But, that is life, I suppose. Things rarely go the way we want them to, and there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it. At least he won't die. I just want him to be better right now.

The next time I see him half naked and sweating it had better be a good thing.