Lord Jesus help me! I cry out to you oh Lord! The pain inside me is more than I can bear. I need your intervention! I need you back in my life. I have fallen away and ignored your previous plea’s for me. I’m now up and listening oh God. I want your presence, I need your presence. If you can find one small ember in me please help me fan it into a blazing fire. Money, my house or even food means nothing to me without you Jesus! Resurrect me oh Lord, Resurrect me.

- Amen

Tuesday morning after I ate cereal I started to have my regular stomach pains (meaning I just might have a pancreatitis attack coming). My usual at home routine is to take my pain medicine and get into a hot bath. I did that and the pain slightly went down. Since I was working from home til noon I figured I’d be okay to work and went ahead got on the laptop and got to work. By 10:45 the pain was back and I repeated my usual procedure pain meds followed by a hot bath. It now wasn’t working and I called my dad for a ride to the ER.

We got to the ER at about 1-1:30 and it was a mad house. Two ambulances just came in and the waiting room was slapped full. After waiting about an hour and a half they brought me back and started fluids and pain meds. It’s wild that intravenous pain meds work so much better and faster than the pill form ones. About an hour or so later my enzyme results were in and they weren’t too good. Amylase was 1280 and lipase was 840. For those of you that are familiar with enzyme levels.. The normal amylase is 150 and lipase is 50.

Once admitted and in my room I couldn’t eat or drink anything but ice chips. By this time I was in pain about every 2-2 1/2 hours. That night was pretty rough and didn’t get much sleep. The next morning at about 5:00 am they took blood to recheck my enzyme levels again. I received the scary and unexpected results at about 8:00 am. My Amylase was 2436 and my lipase was 4250. When I found this out I started to freak out just a little. The Doctor was able to calm me down and explain that it’s common for enzyme levels to go up before they go down. That day was another only ice chips day as well. For supper I did get chicken broth though which was the best meal I’ve had in the past two days. That night was another sleepless night but I was taking my pain medicine a lot less frequently.The next morning my enzyme levels were Amylase 840 and lipase 450. That was a relief to me. That afternoon the doctor met with me and agreed I could go home and continue with at home treatments. I was so relieved I could go home!

Now I’m home and feeling better. I am still sore and tired but at least I’m at home. I will be getting my enzyme levels rechecked Friday and hope they are back to normal.

Well I got a call from my doctor today with my blood work results. They tested my Enzyme levels earlier this week to see if they were still elevated or have gotten back to normal.
Here are last weeks results:
Amylase: 342
Lipase: 241

This weeks results:
Amylase: 91
Lipase: 63

I’m sure glad I’m back to normal! No more broth/chicken soup! Semi-normal very low fat foods from now on.

This is an update to my Weekend Pancreatitis Attack

Last night I attended the Gary Vaynerchuck Social Media event at Independence Park Theatre, in Baton Rouge LA. Gary is the author of the book Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion and runs the website Wine Library TV. I honestly didn’t know a lot about him other than these two things but was interested in what he had to say about personal branding and social media. Here are some great points he touched on during his talk. Also, he’s a great story teller. If you every get a chance to hear him speak go. It will be well worth it.

• If you don’t get into social media you will lose.
• Word of mouth closes 72-20 percent of the time.
• Facebook and Twitter are word of mouth tools.
• Own what your about.
• it’s always the message.
• In Three years we will all be in the customer service business.
• Like a small town, through social media we are all connected and know everyone’s business. That’s where business is going.
• Everyone, every relationship, every customer is now the press.

These are just some of the great points he made last night. If you interested in more of this check out his book and blog!

Ever feel like day in and day out your like a worker ant going back and forth to work. Same time, same traffic, same cars, same route every single day. You even get used to seeing the same cars day in and day out. Thinking of this can be depressing making you ask yourself “Am I only here to work and not enjoy life?”.

Some things I have done to make me feel better about myself are taking different routes. New scenery can be quite refreshing rather than seeing the same ole buildings and traffic lights.

It’s close to the end of January and only recently have I put any thought into resolutions or goals for this new year. With so much going on lately neither me or my wife had resolutions. I’m believing to 2010 to be a great year for me!

Professional/Social

• Tweet at least ten times a day.
• Write at least one blog post a week.
• Start two revenue generating websites.
• Make better and stronger connections within my social networks.

Personal

• Fish more.
• find an outdoor hobby.
• get down to 165lbs.

Home

• Build or have a fence built in my backyard.

First let me start with a little history. I’m 32 years old with Cystic Fibrosis and for the most part pretty healthy. Ever since turning thirty I have started getting acute pancreatitis attacks. I’ve been to the ER probably 6-7 times in the past 2 years for pancreatitis. Pancreatitis is common in people with Cystic Fibrosis because thick sticky mucus can plug the pancreatic ducts and cause inflammation of the pancreas. When my pancreas is inflamed it causes the most severe pain I have ever experienced. Also, several doctors have told me it’s one of the most painful things a person can go through.

This weekend was supposed to be like any other weekend, but boy was I wrong. Saturday I woke up around 8am feeling a little pain in my stomach. I was hoping it was just hunger pains so for breakfast I had a couple of pieces of Ezekiel bread with a dab of strawberry jelly to see if that would help. Within an hour of eating the toast I was in full-blown pain feeling like someone was ripping out my guts with a meat hook. My usual routine for my pancreatitis attacks is take a Oxycontin or Hydromorphone and lay in a hot bath. Well this didn’t help so off to the ER I went.

I go through the usual routine of them thinking I’m a drug addict because I need fluids and major pain management. It’s somewhat understandable because the emergency rooms must see druggie’s day in and day out, but Saturday was different. After checking in I waited almost 2 hours in the waiting room while other people were able to walk right in and go to the back to see a doctor. By this time my pain medicine was wearing off and it pain increasing at a fast pace. I couldn’t think straight and started to get real nauseous. I pleaded with the receptionist to see if a bed was available during this time as well. Finally they call my name and to the back I go.

The nurse comes in to take my vitals, blood and ask the follow-up questions from when I checked in. “So I see your having stomach pains” she says. When I checked in I specifically told them acute pancreatitis. They didn’t write that down or take time to look at my history in that ER, so they wrote down stomach pain. Which explains why everyone went ahead of me while I waited in pain. By this time the pain was really kicking and I couldn’t even stay very still.

The emergency room doctor came in, I’ll call him Beetle Bailey. I preceded to give him my history, tell him about my specialist’s and so on. He thankfully gives me Dilaudid which wipes out the pain within five minutes. Thirty minutes or so Beetle Bailey comes back in to check on me and I ask how my enzyme levels were. Usually the higher levels the more painful it is. He decided not to check them since I have chronic pancreatitis. I am a little loopy but thinking “what the heck”? They’ve never done this before! I mention about getting a prescription for the weekend until I go to my primary doctor. He asks what non-narcotic medicine can I take for this? Again I’m thinking do you know anything about pancreatitis? I tell him Oxycontin and he gets my primary doctors name to verify. After he leaves my wife, mom and I talk about how much an idiot Beetle Bailey is. Shauna, my wife leaves a message for my primary doctor to let her know I was in the ER and I will be trying to see her on Monday.

By this time a new doctor comes in, we will call him Dr. Short man. He’s short, like five foot three inches short. He walks in all cocky and says “So you have pancreatitis? Do you think you can eat something yet?”. I look at him like he’s the stupidest doctor in the world and say “no, I probably will not be able to eat for a couple of days”. The only way to give your pancreas rest is not to eat and drinking clear liquids for several days. He mentions that the other doctor told him that I needed Oxycontin and he says “Yea, we can’t do that because we might get audited”. Again he asks for my primary doctors name for a fourth time to talk to her. I’m on my third bag of fluid, still can’t pee and aggravated. Shauna’s phone rings at the same time Beetle Baily comes in to tell us he can’t find any information on my primary doctor and she says “Hey that’s them calling now”. He then yells “I can’t talk to them on your phone” and he runs out the room. I’m now thinking I’m in the twilight zone. What the heck are wrong with these doctors? While Shauna is talking to my primary doctor they get a page from Beetle Baily. That’s pretty interesting that he couldn’t find my doctor and in less than two minutes he was able to find the number and page the doctor. When I finished my fourth bag of fluid I was finally able to get out of there. This was easily my worse experience at an emergency room. I hope I never have to see those two doctors again!

Thanks for reading my little rant. I hope it wasn’t to boring to you.

I bought the Todo iPhone app yesterday in hopes to get better organized. I have searched and searched for a Todo app for the iPhone for the past few weeks. I even tested  out some free ones that looked promising but they lacked the features and cleanness of an app that I needed. One being very important for me was notifications. I forget to look at my Todo list and I can get a pop up reminding me about my task. Since I had an iTunes gift card from my birthday I decided to take the plunge and buy the Todo app from Appigo. I read many reviews and looked at the screen shots and felt like it would help me in my tasks.  So far after using it for a day I really love it! It has tons of features and functionality. I have organized my lists for groups of tasks for home, work, my wife’s business, etc. I like the way you can create a task and it can be a normal, project, checklist, call, email, sms, visit location or visit website. The sample tasks are a project task with sub-tasks under it, grocery list which is a checklist, normal task to go to the Appigo website. I have a lot of confidence that this will help me with my ADHD and forgetfulness on things to do. Well, there’s a reminder notification, I better get to work!