Gastroenteritis vs Pancreatitis

[geekgirl101]

Last year during the winter season I had caught gastroenteritis about 3 or 4 times. It's a nasty condition, it causes severe pain in the stomach region just below the breastline, severe upper back pain, fever, and uncontrollable vomitting until the entire stomach is empty. No matter what position you go in the pain gets no better. Hot water bottles applied to the back and stomach region may help with the pain somewhat, as will painkillers and antispasmonics. Emptying the stomach either through vomitting or sticking your fingers down your throat to cause vomitting will make you feel better after an hour or two, but the pain will still continue to hamper you for a few more days and you'll not be able to eat solid foods for at least a week and will need to stick to a fluid diet and gradually move onto soft foods like rice, bananas, apple sauce, and then slowly onto solid foods.

Pancreatitis on the other hand has similar symptoms to gastroenteritis, but at a much worse rate. You may notice your skin is glowing yellow, your vomitting will be much more severe that it feels like your insides are being squished, you'll have huge amounts of stomach acid burning away in your stomach and chest, the pain will also be in the lower part of the back where the kidneys are and the pain just gets worse and worse and no amount of painkillers will ease it off. You may even pass blood in your urine. This is when it's time to call an ambulance. The only painkiller that will help you at this time is a strong dose of morphine followed by immediate treatment with an antibiotic provided by a drip for the pancreatitis. You will also be given water through a drip as you will not be allowed to eat or drink whilst being treated for a number of days. It's a horrible condition that has you bed bound for several days unable to change position, and you may end up sleeping most the time from using morphine shots for the pain. The recovery time for pancreatitis appears to be much longer than that for gastroenteritis and it could be several weeks before you're able to eat solid foods again and be normally active.

I'm posting this because last month I had pancreatitis that was misdiagnosed as gastroenteritis since the symptoms were identical to begin with. Whilst the general idea is if it's gastroenteritis don't bother calling a doctor since they can't do anything and you risk spreading the disease because it is so contagious, you must keep an eye out for anything that's not normal and if standard treatment doesn't work and you notice your skin glowing yellow you must see a doctor right away or go straight to hospital.

[Jason Tandro]

I just love when a mostly harmless and a deadly disease have similar symptoms. Its just natures way of saying: Do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?

But in all seriousness, i hope things are going better for you.

[geekgirl101]

Yeah, I've made a near full recovery, although I managed to pick up a number of infections from the hospital just as I left. I had no idea how serious my condition was until I was told by my husband that I was in HDU for a day, a day that I don't recall any moment of. All I can remember was being given a morphine injection into my belly, then a mask put over my mouth, then I was being wheeled into the recovery ward where I spent the next 5 or 6 days.

What gets me though is that the day before I went into hospital I visited an out of hours emergency clinic for some powerful antacids and antisickness to deal with the high amount of acid I had in my stomach. None of the over the counter medicine was working and taking so much medicine was making me sick. They saw I had yellow skin and was looking weak and in pain, surely after seeing those symptoms they would've recognised that there was something more serious than gastroenteritis, like acute kidney failure or gallstones.