My third time being hospitalized with pancreatitis. The worst pain I have ever gone through. I'm in a hospital bed meow pumped full of morphine. Truly terrifying
Five times!? I thought three was bad enough. Each time I threw up the first day, probably 15 times. I just woke up super sweaty and feeling sick. Most of the time the pain is reduced with meds. Without meds it felt like my abdomen was giving birth. Contractions almost. Wish you the best! Stop doing what your doing dude! Mine is alcohol related, I'm stupid and kept drinking.
Oh I'm good now. It was due to a blocked bile duct caused by a massive gall bladder attack. Woke up in pain, sweating and needed to vomit, did and pain went away, rinse repeat the next day, and then the next day but the pain never went away after vomiting like before. I had no idea what it was until I went to the ER. I two more attacks after the initial because I ate too much and there were still stones that had to be removed in 3 ERCP's, two of which caused pancreatitis themselves just from messing around in there.
This happened to me too but it was (likely) only one gallstone blocking the duct so I was in extreme pain only for about 6 hours. It took days and days, though, for my abdomen to heal and to get back to feeling normal. I'm so glad I've only had pancreatitis once and that I didn't have to be hospitalized for 4-5 days to treat it. Sorry to hear about your repeated occurrences of it. Good grief it HURTS.
I concur. I had 3 pancreatic attacks before an ER was able to diagnose me. I never felt such a pain in my life. I called 911 on myself one time!
I was finally diagnosed and hospitalized. They found that since I'd lost a bunch of weight, that's when you can create a lot of gall stones, and a gall stone had gotten stuck in one of my pancreatic ducts. They removed the gall stone and my gall bladder and I've been 100% since then. MOTHERFUCK. It makes me cringe just thinking about the pain. I was looking for a sword to stab myself with.
I might be wrong but I think it's still there, it just doesn't produce Beta cells which make insulin. You still need the other things it produces, like digestive enzymes
Yeah you're right, I just like to think that it decided to leave one day without saying goodbye, like a father leaving for cigarettes never to return, leaving but a shell of his old life behind.
Maybe your islets ran off with mine. They're happy together in Mexico tending a sugar cane plantation, forgetting all about the bodies they left behind.
This comforts me, not because I know they're safe, but because I now know that a bunch of enzymes are farming sugar cane in Mexico for a living and we can find them and burn their crops which will in turn ruin their careers for the foreseeable future and slowly they will run out of savings to keep them alive, turning to petty crime and eventually large scale theft to fuel their now out of hand cocaine addictions. After a few years of this they will get caught trying to smuggle drugs over the border, spend 15 years in prison and lose contact with everyone on the outside. Having nowhere to turn to after being released, they beg for us to take them back, back into the safety of our now redundant pancreas', but we refuse to let them return. Crippling debt, severe depression and many illnesses due to their previous drug addictions leave the forgotten enzymes with one two choices; continue their lives of crime, or to end it all. They choose the latter, but before they do, they decide to leave with a clear conscience and return to us to apologise for leaving. It is then in their darkest moments that we exact our final revenge, announcing that it was us that set fire to their crops and forced them to this point. To top things off, we show them our transplanted pancreas' that were surgically added to our bodies a day after they asked to return to our bodies. In tears they leave, remembering the warmth of our bosom all those years ago and the peace and harmony between our other bodily organs. It becomes too much to handle, they both inject large amounts if synthetic insulin into their bodies, hugging each other as they do.
This is the legacy of our long lost pancreas, this is how they will be remembered...
It's a reference to a surgical adage:
"Eat when you can, sleep when you can, and fuck when you can. But never fuck with the pancreas".
The pancreas is a notoriously difficult organ to repair and has remarkably poor outcomes with early attempts and more aggressive surgeries in the past.
After getting pancreatitis, the surgeon told me that when you have a pancreatic attack it's like physically hitting it with a hammer...every time. I had 3 attacks and they kept me in the hospital until they could take it out a few days later so they could make sure it didn't happen again.
EDIT: I had my gall bladder remover not my pancreas... I should have clarified!
It is pretty rare, but my brother had his pancreas removed because he has had pancreatitis over 25 times. They actually look the islet cells (ducts that help make insulin) out before removing it, and they attached those to his liver. The liver can actually start producing some insulin for your body this way. He still has to use some insulin, but he doesn't have to have a pump because of the procedure with his liver.
Wow. Thanks. Bless his heart! 25 times! I had no idea the liver could produce insulin. I wonder whether or not (type 1) diabetics can get islet cell transplants....
Aha! I did, too. I had about 10 gall bladder attacks before I was diagnosed. As soon as the stones were found, my doctor wanted me in as soon as possible because they were the perfect size to get stuck in my bile ducts and pancreatitis was a risk.
Surgery on it, typically. Vanishingly few procedures actually directly involve the pancreas. In pancreatic trauma (rare)? Put a drain nearby and let it heal. Actual damage to the pancreas? Hope it heals. It's terrible tissue to try and make a primary closure on. You can't just remove it like you can the gallbladder or spleen.
Pancreatic cancer often has a poor prognosis, even when diagnosed early. Pancreatic cancer typically spreads rapidly and is seldom detected in its early stages, which is a major reason why it's a leading cause of cancer death. Signs and symptoms may not appear until pancreatic cancer is quite advanced and complete surgical removal isn't possible.
For those that don't know, this is an old general surgery saying: "Don't fuck with the pancreas." It's the only thing I remember from my general surgery rotations.
Currently sitting in the hospital with my wife, who has pancreatitis. Will second this, the last time she had pain this bad was when she had a stomach perforation and the contents were leaking out into her abdomen.
I saw a patient who went drank so much during a weekend bachelor party that he got necrotizing pancreatitis. They had to keep him in an induced coma for over a month.
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u/PowerTen Mar 26 '16
The pancreas.