A Few Thoughts on Diverticulitis

Diverticulitis is an inflammation of the wall of the colon. It hurts like a mother. I can make that statement from personal experience. I got diagnosed with it today.

For the past couple of days I was having chills. Kept thinking to myself that I was catching the flu. Curses.
Then yesterday I started with lower abdominal pain. It was like someone was squeezing my guts from the front. It seemed to hurt when I went pee, so I started to think I had a UTI. Why would a guy get a UTI? Who knows? I told Mrs. Whitecoat that maybe my prostate was all backed up from lack of use. “Nice try,” she says with a grin.
Later in the day yesterday, I started getting pain in my back. Like someone was sticking a sharp stick in the midline right above my butt. When my stomach hurt, it made my back hurt even worse. I was falling apart.

It was worse this morning, so I bit the bullet and saw my doctor. Rebound tenderness. Normal urine. I start freaking that my appendix is about to come out. Got a prescription and off to the CT scanner.

The waiting room at the CT suite is a good cross section of society. An old guy in jeans and wearing a beret walking across the room in a walker steadied on one arm by his son. A yuppie texting furiously on her Blackberry. A mom reading a magazine sitting next to her teenage kid texting furiously on her phone. A dad holds his one year old over his shoulder and a grandma sitting behind him makes faces until the kid laughs. The dad pulls him down to see what is so funny and then gets a laugh when he catches grandma still making her faces. I’m just sitting in the corner taking it all in and rattling off a couple of comments to the blog on my computer.
I get called to the front and get handed a glass of liquid. Mmmmm. No flavored barium for me. That tastes like a warm milkshake. This gastrograffin stuff tastes horrible. I can’t even think of anything to compare it to. Maybe a thick funky tasting vinegar. Blecch.
I finish the glass. There’s a lady sitting at the counter with a Starbucks cup in front of her. I caught her laughing at me when I was making faces drinking this stuff. I give her a toast as I finish the last sip of vinegar. She smiles.
An hour later they call my name. I gather my stuff to go in the back and get my CT scan. Then the lady sitting at the counter hands me another glass of vinegar to drink. “You got to drink it all,” she says. She gives me a smug little grin. They really want me to puke, don’t they? I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of watching me drink the second glass, so I move to another part of the room out of her eyesight. As I’m walking I look at the carpet. It’s a really tight weave, almost no pile, and a dark color. I wonder how many people have puked in the waiting room.
I catch Starbucks lady filing stuff in another part of the office and watching me out of the corner of her eye. I see her trying to hold back a smile. I decide that I’m going to pay one of the office staff to dump some vinegar in her Starbucks cup. I squinted my eyes and wrinkled my nose at her. She laughed and went back to her seat.

Finally I get brought back to the scanning suite. They lay me on the CT scanning gurney and the lady starting my IV found out that I was a doctor. She was all nervous about poking me with the IV needle. I could feel her hands shaking when she was looking for a vein. She asks me if I’m afraid of needles. I raised an eyebrow and asked “Whyyyyy….?” She laughed. That seemed to put her at ease. I was going to scream “Ooouuuuch!” when she stuck me, but thought she would lose it and lacerate one of my arteries or something. I kept my mouth shut.

During the actual CT scan, you get directions from some automated voice. “Hold your breath … Breathe.” Little pictures of a Pac-Man guy opening his mouth and then holding his breath light up in synchrony with the automated voice. Seeing that deep breaths made my stomach hurt, I was only taking small breaths and then turning blue watching little Pac-Man dude.

The dye that is injected into your bloodstream makes you feel warm all over and gives you a bitter taste in your mouth. It also gives you the sensation of smelling iodine for about a minute. If you are a guy, it makes your woohoo all warm as if you just wet your pants. None of these are allergic reactions. They are side effects.

After the scan, they take me out to the reading room to talk with the radiologist. Most of the time patients have to wait for their CT report to get sent to their doctor. So this is one perk I get for being a doctor. The radiologist shows me how inflamed my colon has become. All the normally thin walls of the colon are now thick and inflamed. The black areas in the center of the picture are the inner lumen of my colon. The gray areas around the black lumen are the inflamed walls. The one toward the bottom of the screen just above my sacrum isn’t so bad. The one angling to the upper right from the middle of the screen is way inflamed. Dang! He shakes his head while he is talking. “Next time don’t wait so long to see someone.”

The rest of the day was kind of a waste. Getting the runs from the contrast material. It hurts my stomach to button my pants. Walking also hurts. When my bladder gets full the pain gets worse. A couple of days on antibiotics and I’ll be good as new … I hope.

By the way, Throckmorton’s sign was positive, but I’m not posting radiographic evidence of my woohoo to the whole blogosphere. You’ll have to take my word for it.

UPDATE - FEBRUARY 7, 2008 
Thanks to everyone for the kind wishes.
Pain’s not a whole lot better, but it isn’t getting worse. Motrin does me just fine, thanks. Diarrhea from medications is not fun, but everyone could use a therapeutic system cleansing now and then, right?