Sometimes life is bumpy but I've had a rocky month

So I was suppose to have my tonsils out on the 1st but had tonsillitis. So I had surgery the next week. Then a week after my surgery I thought I was finally feeling a little better but oh no, things just got a whole lot worse.

A week ago Sunday I thought I was finally healing and that the "scab" in the back of my throat was slowly coming off (as it should be). But around 11 pm, while reading in bed, I thought a bigger part of the scab had come off and instead of swallowing it I thought I would spit it out. Well I ended up spitting out a mouth full of blood. This was not what I was expecting. I went upstairs and got my parents out off bed to help me. After more blood kept coming my parents called 911. The fire department came and checked me out and they called the aid car. For a while the bleeding had slowed down and we were told that it was safe enough for my parents to drive me to the emergency room.

So we went to Virginia Mason. The ENT surgeon had to be call, as did the rest of the operating room staff. During this I was still bleeding and spitting out blood. The surgeon made it in and because I was bleeding so much he stuck his very big hands in my mouth to put pressure on the back of my throat where I was bleeding from. The surgeon wanted to stop the bleeding because I was bleeding so much but also because they needed to put a tube down my throat so my air way wouldn't be compromised during surgery. The surgeon says that in most cases it doesn't look like as much blood as it is. But in my case the surgeon thought that I had lost two pints of blood.

The surgeon patched me up and poked around to make sure that this sort of thing wouldn't happen again. I spent three days at Virginia Mason. Turning 22 was not a whole lot of fun. Because I lost so much blood I am very anemic but because I am young and healthy I was not given a blood transfusion. I am now at home and resting. Doing a whole lot makes me very tired and I have to be careful about how fast I get up... because I can get dizzy easily. I am finally eating somewhat normal food. Soft and bland food got old very fast and I am craving everything I can't have.

When I went to see the ENT about getting my tonsils out in April he told me about that bleeding was a possible complication and that while the chances were 3-5% he had never lost anyone and it was mostly just very scary. Well, I thought that bleeding would happen within the first few days, not a week later. And he was right it was very scary. I'm just starting to process what happen. I don't think of myself as a calm person but I didn't process anything while it was going on. The worst thing for me was how long I was bleeding for and how uncomfortable it was to have the surgeon's huge hands in my mouth stopping the bleeding.

There are no pictures of the ordeal - but pictures of Europe instead.

Check out my trip to Europe! http://picasaweb.google.com/aewdenton

I'm hoping to have an uneventful summer and am looking forward to going back to work in the next week.

Thanks for the love and support!