New Pain Scale

With a recent ER-worthy medical adventure, I now have a new pain scale. I thought I knew what pain was.  I’ve had stab wounds, joints dislocated, hot grease that was literally on fire land on my legs, wisdom teeth dug out without anesthesia (hello, EDS side effect), and natural child birth. This, however, gets first place for pain.

Perhaps part of it was I had no idea what was happening. I had movie clips from the movie Alien popping up in my mind while it was happening, and I wasn’t far off! I kept saying that I needed imaging, but I was patient 36 in an ER made for 35, which had a skeleton crew including one very busy MRI tech.

I was making sure Kevin knew where the important paperwork was because I thought I might just die. Then he looked so concerned I tried to reassure and crack some jokes, but my brain wasn’t able to function through the pain, so I just told him that I loved him in case that was the last thing he heard me say.

Now on a scale of 1-10, childbirth still lands at 10, and a kidney stone gets a 20.

Especially with prior lab work being consistently healthy, it’s strongly suspected that the antihistamine I was taking caused my glucose levels to significantly increase, and at my follow-up with the urologist, I was the second patient that week with this likely scenario. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but with the increase in MCAS (and similar conditions) post-covid, there is likely an increase in patients dealing with this. The specialists need to talk to each other more about these things and compare notes. Based on what we now know, I should have had lab work about 6 months after starting the antihistamine regime to see how my body was doing with it.   For those of you also on the antihistamines (and I know several of you are), it’s something to be aware of.

I know to get lab work for the ferrets if they start a medication, but it didn’t occur to me to do this for myself. As much as I am trying to make sure I take care of myself more now instead of being only other-focused, I keep having these face-palming moments of failure.

I’m now taking quercetin, DAO, and other supplements for the histamine, along with paying attention to what seems to push me past my histamine threshold (and also what helps).  Fresh air, low stress, lots of water, and a “curated” healthy food list. It complicates life a bit, but there are worse things (such as kidney stones!).