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.