High Output

So… to fill you in. I was admitted to the hospital Wednesday night, with dangerously low Sodium levels. It turns out that I am one of the 16% of lucky people who end up with a high output stoma (HOS). In other words my system is flushing a lot of liquid out the stoma, and my body can’t keep up with hydration and electrolytes. So I’ve been here three plus days and they’ve been supporting my body with a continuous saline drip, got my Sodium levels up, and are tinkering with various meds to slow down the transit time. Effectively I have a really good case of diarrhea. We all know how dehydrating that can be.

So far it seems to be slowing down some, but it hasn’t resolved completely. I know have at least three meds to address it. I have spoken with the Hospitalist this morning and he said he was calling in the GI doc. I saw that doc and he discussed it all with me. There is another drug that has recently been approved for this sort of situation which we are going to try, but he doesn’t think it is necessarily a silver bullet. It feels like they are tinkering to see what will work. But to let me go prematurely will just mean probably ending up right back here in the hospital. So we gotta get this ileostomy to calm down to a more manageable level that won’t dehydrate me.

In any case it’s abundantly clear to me now that in the days getting back from Sanoviv before ending up here, when I really felt like death warmed over, and I was so weak and fatigued and could hardly do anything, that was lack of Sodium. I was really close to the red-line dangerous edge. Coulda killed me. Getting rehydrated, and re-Sodium-ed caused me to feel so much better that lying in bed is getting tiresome. At least this bed is comfortable. And clean, because they changed it while I had a lovely shower, too.

Soon for lunch.

So that’s pretty much what I know for now.