Bowel Transit Test

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As many of you know,  I have been having lots of problem with my stomach again. Finding a gastro doctor was the hardest part. Now that I have found a great gastro doctor its time to get nasty tests done.  The doctor I am seeing is at the Henry Ford Hospital.  We leave 3 hours away.  My gastro doctor ordered a bowel transit test. This test measures how long it takes for food to travel through the digestive tract.  She is doing tests I have never gotten done in my life.

This test requires you to swallow a capsule filled with 24 rubber band markers looking markers that show up on an x-ray.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving on a Wednesday I went to the hospital to swallow the capsule.  I instructed not to take any laxatives a week before and during the test. The doctor wants to see how your system works naturally. In five days you will return to get the x-ray.  If all twenty-four markers are still in your system they will you come back two days later.

Monday I received my first x-ray.  The nurse told me all 24 markers are in my system. Eighteen of them are still in my stomach and five of them just entered my small bowel. Because none of them passed I had to go back on Wednesday (Day before Thanksgiving).

Got up traveled three hours to get my second x-ray. The nurse they still see twenty-two rubberbands. Two are still seen in the stomach and eighteen are in a cluster in the small bowel and two are seen entering the colon. Two of them they can't find, but they don't think I passed it. They just think it just not showing up or hiding behind stool.  Colon Transit test was an easy test to do. There was no discomfort.

It will be interesting to hear what the diagnose is.

Now the next test I have to get done is Endoscopy with Camera Capsule placement and a colonoscopy

Almost Killed a Nurse

My stomach is getting worse. After my appendix was removed a couple of months later I started having problems around my lower stomach area. It now has spread all over my stomach, but the worse area is the sides and lower part of my stomach.  

Once school ended I decided I should get it looked at. I went to my Gastro doctor where I live. It has been ten years since my last Endoscopy and Colonoscopy. To my surprise, she didn't even want to do the basic testing to figure out what is going on. She decided to send me to the University of Michigan Hospital's Gastro department. I was hot because she kept saying things like, "Graduating from college adds a lot of stress to your life." Basically, she told me its just stress and IBS. IBS is a catch-all. It is when a doctor doesn't want to deal with figuring out what is going on or has no clue what is going on they will diagnose it as IBS.  I wasn't happy at all.
        Saturday I drove from Grand Rapids, Michigan to the University of Michigan. I had a horrid nurse experience.  Please pardon my language. She poked me 8 times and I finally said, "I want someone else." She then goes on saying "If you don't have me do it then you won't be getting your CT Scan today." I replied crying and pissed off at the same time. I said to her, "I am not leaving this F**ing spot and I am getting this F** x-ray done right now. I didn't suffer for two days with the steroid prep for and drank the nasty shit to have to come back and do it all over again because you f**ing suck as a nurse and who won't call in someone else to do. If you leave this eighth needle in my arm and its not fully in the vein, which it isn't, and the contrast causes damages to my arm I will sue your ass. Not the hospital. YOU." She then pulls out the eighth needle, which was hanging out of my arm bleeding all over the place, and goes to get someone else. The CT Scan nurse cames in and gets in one try. Asshole nurse you should have called her in sooner after the third try when I asked you nicely. I am not a person that has a temper. I feel like I am such an evil person for getting so upset, but when you have Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy it can be scary especially when I started feeling the RSD pain spreading into my arms. 

Have you ever had a bad nurse experience? Let me know make a comment.