Third time's the charm...

I was leaning over a hospital bed at 4.30am in the morning, vomiting, crying, shaking - and my first thought was 'oh God - I don't want to do this again'.
The only way I can describe the whole experience was labour, but in my chest, with no break between the contractions.

Turns out I have gall stones, or pancreatitis or both - and the pregnancy probably made it worse but it's probably been the reason for my back and chest pains sometimes, late at night, which I'd attributed to the curve in my mattress.

But the scary part was waking up clammy & shaking at 2am and convincing myself it was indigestion...and then having to admit at 4.30am that I'd have to wake the kids up, wrap them in doonas and shovel them into the backseat in the dark, drive myself up the road to hospital & admit that I wasn't coming to work.

The nurses & I were all assuming it was something easier to explain, like indigestion gone wrong, until I started vomiting mylanta & fluro-yellow bile everywhere.

I was desperately writing instructions for the local staff and the potential replacement as they debated whether to give me morpheine as well as the codeine.
I was messaging my boss and kept bending the IV in half and sending off alarms because you can't text without bending your arm, let's face it.
I was fighting the morpheine to make sure the kids were still asleep on the visitor couches and no one rang my parents before they'd normally be up, unless the kids did get up, or were upset.

...how am I going to do this on my own again?
How am I going to manage the midnight runs to hospital for rotavirus or high temperatures?
How am I going to stretch myself between 13-year-olds and 3-year-olds and their different needs?

And you know what broke me, in the middle of all the drama and the vomiting and the pain and the drugs was a nurse I know just a little, rubbing my back and saying quietly 'and maybe you're just a little bit stressed as well eh? maybe you've been worrying a bit'.
It's been a long time since I cried like that.
And when my parents came & picked up the kids I just turned off my phone, rolled over with my head under a pillow & let someone else deal with it all for a little while.