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Will you help me decide whether to seek more urgent medical attention?

Asked by Mariah (25883points) February 19th, 2017

Hey guys, sorry to be asking this sort of question. I would just love to have outside opinions.

Ever since my abdominal surgery in November I am having an unfamiliar pain. It has been off and on for these last few months and it has been moving all over my abdominal cavity. Currently it is more severe than it is usually, and it is on both the left and right in the front just under my rib cage. At other times it has been lower and more toward the back. It is a sharp pain that hurts very badly if I sneeze, burp, cough, or even breathe too heavily. At times if I move wrong it will seemingly trigger something and I will get spasms in the painful area. It gets a lot worse right after I eat or if I take Imodium, which makes me wonder if it’s in my small bowel (which is, granted, the part of me that got operated on in November).

My GI can’t see me until 3/1 and I have already had 3 appointments with my PCP about this. She did a chest x-ray and a urine screen (because the pain keeps moving around so much that at one point I thought it was pneumonia or pleurisy and at another I thought it was a kidney stone), both were clean of anything unusual. She wasn’t sure what else to try and seemed to think that it is just part of the healing process from my surgery. The thing that makes me doubt that is that it has not gotten better with time and honestly seems like it’s slowly getting worse.

I am debating whether I should go to the emergency room before my GI appointment. It feels to me like nothing will get solved and my time will be wasted, and that it isn’t really an emergency because it has been going on for awhile, but I am just nervous because I can’t identify this pain. I am used to having things wrong with me but usually I know what they are.

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