Dr. Funk's diagnosis

In the hospital, I didn't ask for pain medicine often. Maybe twice at the most. When asked to assign a number to the pain, the worse it got was maybe a 4 or 5. On the night before I was to come home, I developed a bright red patch under my eye. Knowing my body the way that I do, I said to the nurse on duty, who coincidentally was wearing a hospital gown over her clothes, that something was wrong. The "nurse who wanted to be a patient", said that I was allergic to the wash cloth. Um, yeah....NO. I know my body. I later woke up with the bright red patches all over my face and a pain in my side along with my gut. The nurse thought it was that I was rubbing my face. Luckily the pain in my side had her request the GI doctor on call in the ER to come up to take a look at me. He and I concluded that I was allergic to morphine, particularly because my rash was all under my neck too.

I've taken maybe 3 pain pills since being home. I do have a high tolerance for pain so that helps. Well, yesterday the cramping and occasional spasms in the middle of my "gut" (which rhymes with the words "but" and "cut" and can be used with the nonsense words of "lut" and "sut"...I have to keep my school skills sharp...no wonder I don't get many points when I play scrabble or "words with friends") became more constant. Yesterday evening I took a pain pill and another one just now.  My pain level number is increasing to maybe a 7. If I was at school talking about a student, I would make a visual with Boardmaker for easier identification of the pain. Heck with this number system. Anyway, using the advanced medical degree that I have (all mothers have this degree) I had diagnosed that the spasms were a result of having the breathing tube down my esophagus and another tube with a camera and needle on the end rooting around during the ERCP. The cramping was coming from this mass in my pancreas causing havoc with my stomach. Well, Dr. Funk isn't sure why the pain is getting worse. All I can say is that you can stop squeezing my gut at any time now.

I really do have written documentation of my medical degree. Recently, I diagnosed one of my students as having velopharyngeal insufficiency. It was confirmed by the E.N.T. that I was correct. As the speech-language pathologist who referred the student, he faxed the results of his finding to me at school. He thanked "Dr. Funk" for the referral of this child to his office. Yes, not only do I have one report with my title on it, I have two. Luckily Dr. Funk had received a follow up report notifying of his recommendation that my little guy needed surgery to correct the excessive air that was escaping through his nose.