Tuesday update

Well, we had a crazy busy day today, but got a lot done. I had a bunch of tests (see yesterday's post) and met with 2 doctors. The first Dr I met with was the psychologist who works with pain management and the pancreas team. Today was really an assessment, where he realized that basically, I'm bat shit crazy, lol! He and the pain doc are working together to develop a plan that includes weaning off the narcotics, learning how to control my pain, and shift my way of thinking that I have no self worth while I'm unable to do anything that contributes to society. I also saw Dr Dunn today. I told her that I highly recommend they have all of their patients meet with these guys before they go home. I have seen many post-op patients who have lots of troubles around the 6 month timeline. She wants to talk to the whole team tomorrow, but it sounds like we're not going to do surgery at this point anyway. I was lukewarm on the idea - I'm not too excited about having ANOTHER surgery, but I was kind of hoping for a quick fix. Dr Dunn thinks that my massive amount of scar tissue is definitely contributing to my pain, but removing that scar tissue can cause pretty severe complications if the bowels are perforated or kinked in any way. So, I think we're going to sit tight for another 3 months or so and see if my pain improves using these other techniques first. And I'm OK with that. Tomorrow and Thursday I have tests for the study drug that take 3-5 hours each day. Friday I meet with the pain doc again. I think we'll be here for about 2 - 2.5 weeks depending on when the psych and pain guy can fit me in. By the way, it got up to 4° today. Tomorrow is supposed to be much warmer. 22°. And snowing. Plus the wind was literally picking up people a la Wizard of Oz. Much fun. How do people DO this every day? Brrr!