For 25 years I've had Crohn's disease. It's been an on-again, off-again thing for me, and never all that serious compared to what some "Crohnies" deal with. On Saturday, I had been feeling absolutely fine when around 6 pm, I suddenly had an onset of intestinal bleeding. I won't go into the really gory details here, but basically, late Saturday night going up the basement stairs to the kitchen caused me to have to lie on the kitchen floor in order not to pass out (at which point, after lying down, I did actually pass out briefly). Then I knew I had a problem.
(What followed immediately after me passing out was actually kind of happy scene typical of the way Debbie and I calmly tackle problems together. It was 11:30 pm and we needed to find someone to come stay with the kids or take me to the ER. I just laid there on the kitchen floor and we brainstormed over who was most likely still awake, able to take me, etc. A real happy domestic scene, paradoxically!)
Anyways, I stayed in the hospital til this morning, getting stabilized and investigated. The GI doc on call said I had lost about half my blood volume. I nearly had a transfusion. Had a colonoscopy, which showed some increase in ulceration from the one 3 months ago,but didn't show a smoking gun, so that was followed by "capsule endoscopy," wherein I swallowed a tiny camera that then took 50,000 pictures as it traveled through my guts and transmitted them to an array of receivers on my abdomen (I'd say "belly" but I'm too skinny for that to be accurate). Felt like a real-life Jules Verne novel, or better yet, as a friend suggested, like that Martin Short movie, "Inner Space."Ever the nerd, I thought this was really cool. Still waiting on the download from that. I hope it shows a clear culprit. Maybe I can get them to burn it to a CD for me and I can post it as streaming video here. Just kidding. I have a dialup connection, and nobody wants to see that.
Coming home was wonderful. Sitting on the living room floor with my three girls tonight after dinner, I felt too lucky and too happy for words.
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