Another Bizarre Day and it is only Half Over

Well, I couldn't sleep last night. During the day, I started having a sharp abdominal pain directly below the center of my ribcage. It got worse as the day went on. Finally, in the evening, it let up enough for me to get to sleep - briefly. But, about midnight, I awoke and could not return to sleep, it was a wired feeling. So, I just rested.

Then, this morning, the sharp pain returned. I could ignore it, though. I could tell there were some serious endorphins at play, because the pain was quite intense, but my body was letting me mostly ignore it. I ate - 3 eggs and a couple sausage links. I have a LOT of practice over the years eating when other people would not. It wasn't hard to eat at all with the pain. Not to say I was hungry,I wasn't. I just don't allow myself to skip meals, because then people can say I'm not eating and make a big deal out of it.

About 11 AM, the pain was quite intense, and I was sweating and warm. Then, sometime over the next 90 minutes, I realized I wasn't feeling the pain anymore, and I wasn't warm either. I was also much more relaxed. Realize, I did nothing to produce this change, it just happened. Getting up and walking around, I can feel a significant difference in my joints. It is as if someone took away the anti-inflammatories. My hips, knees, and ankles all ache as I walk.

So, what happened? Well, the pain was certainly a constriction in circulation to something. My system was obviously working in overdrive to sustain that circulation. That meant pumping every hormone it could..making me hot, tense, and also compensating for the pain. The thing about this condition is that when circulation fails in an area, it just collapses. This is because the driving force is suction, not pumping. With pumping, you can think of it this way - if you have three flexible pipes of varying pressure resistance and decrease the pumping, they will all have a reduction in flow. But with suction, eventually, one flexible pipe will close off. The same is true to pulling harder, I think. Once that happens, all flow through it ceases and is directed around it through other vessels. Even if you were to increase the suction back to what it was, that one would remain closed.

So, what closed off? The article talked about the patients actually having a sigh of relief when the kidneys finally gave out. That would be one possibility. So, a renal vein. Or maybe just the adrenal, so a suprarenal? That sounds like a possibility, given the relaxation that set in. That vein would carry adrenaline. I didn't have any backpain like i did back in March or so which was definitely kidney pain, so I don't know. Another possibility is the pancreas. The article specifically mentioned that imaging would not show anything out of the ordinary until the pancreas was essentially digested - which would have to mean it had lost circulation. The final option, I think is a gastric vein. The article specifically mentioned how the pain from the stomach starting to lose circulation would look like a heart attack and how administering a beta-blocker would cause the stomach to be lost. So, that's definitely a possibility, too. Obviously, there are types of imaging that show blood flow more specifically. A Magnetic Resonance Angiogram (MRA) might be the go-to here, I don't know. Adrenaline "makes your heart beat faster, and your lungs breathe more efficiently, it causes the blood vessels to send more blood to the brain and muscles, increases your blood pressure, makes your brain more alert, and raises sugary levels in the blood to give you energy. Your pupils grow larger and you sweat." Given that my legs feel heavy, I'm colder and less tense, I'm going to say it was a suprarenal vein.

I know it is nice that the pain has stopped, and it is great to not feel the tension I was feeling. The joint pain isn't that bad - certainly an improvement overall - but it makes me feel old and rickety.