Mother's Day

 Today was Mother's Day in New Zealand.

With one son living away from home now and one living at home but always working on a Sunday then this is a quiet day.

However, for me, this weekend has not been pleasant. I started the day yesterday with some upper gastric pain, for no reason. It settled but was a niggle throughout the whole day. It didn't stop me sleeping last night, but food has not been my best friend at all. Leads to increase in the pain. Not uncomfortable to eat, just the colicky pain that I sustain afterwards.

Never had any issue with my gallbladder but pain is also not in the area that I would say is gallbladder related. Well, that is my clinical nursing diagnosis.

After considering all options, all theories and all ideas on how to settle this and not have to suffer any more, I went to the hospital. For some reason, no one else was there (totally unheard of in this current health crisis) and I was seen quite quickly.

A consult with a doctor, some strong IV morphine and I was sailing nicely on a sea of drugs. He diagnosed a form of gastric reflux and gave me relevant medication to assist. Whilst I was sort of happy with this diagnosis, it didn't explain some of my other symptoms but let's wait and see what happens.

Never had IV morphine before but definitely know the nursing care to be applied. Once the nurse had administered it to me, I checked my watch, Steve asked what I was doing and I explained that I needed to know what the time was, as I was pretty certain the nurse who had just given my IV meds was not coming back to check on me within the next 15 minutes!

She had completed no assessments on me prior to administering the med, so had no baseline to measure from and was going, I think, purely from the assessments completed nearly 90 mins beforehand! She did not set me up on the monitor and could have easily attached a BP cuff and a pulse ox to my finger. As I couldn't say if I had ever had this drug before, she needed to check on me within 5 mins to ensure no major reaction or breathing difficulty. She did none of this and in fact, I don't think I ever saw her again during my time in Emergency.

I survived and came home about an hour later, with instructions to follow up with my own family doctor if symptoms persisted.