Preview of my Book!

This is just a small preview of the first page of my book.....I wanted to get some input from everyone.

It's (tentatively) called "Admitted - A Journey Through Modern American Health Care"

“Dude, you gotta take me to the hospital.” My roommate, Matty, knew from the tone of my voice that I was not joking, and he grabbed the keys to my car off the coffee table. At first I thought it was appendicitis, or at least WebMD told me it was. The pain in my abdomen, unexplained, had been ongoing for about four hours. I had awoken to it. I had never felt anything like it before. I called my Mom, since I was away at college, and informed her that my roommate and I were on our way to the hospital. Little did we all know that this one phone call would be the beginning of the toughest, most painful, expensive, and physically and psychologically taxing journey of my young life. What I would learn in the next few years takes most people a lifetime.

Pancreatitis, by definition, is the inflammation of the pancreas. When the Doctors fist came to me with the diagnosis, I had no clue what they were talking about. What did this mean? What was the treatment for it? Was it life threatening? Most of all, I thought, what the fuck is a pancreas?

My parents arrived at the local hospital in Newport, Rhode Island around the same time I heard the word pancreatitis for the first time. We were now on this journey together. My father, who is an attorney at a major pharmaceutical company and has degrees in biology and genetics, knew a little more about the physiology of the pancreas, but he still had a lot to learn. My mother, an attorney like my father, would devote all of her free time in the coming years to learning everything she possibly could about the horrible illness that ailed me.

That first visit to the hospital lasted just over a month. Medically, it was probably the most sick I would be out of all of the hospitalizations that would follow. My pancreas would dominate my life and the life of everyone around me for the immediate future, as my pancreatitis would eventually develop into chronic pancreatitis (CP).

My family and I were devastated to learn that I had developed such a horrible disease. The icing on the proverbial cake is that my CP was found by doctors to be “idiopathic”. Idiopathic is a fancy way of saying they have no idea what causes it. I was tested not only at Newport Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital, but also visited Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. At both hospitals I was subject to rigorous testing by world-renowned doctors. Genetic tests showed that my CP was something I had developed on my own, and did not inherit from either side of my family. Endoscopic ultrasounds (EUS) and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatographies (ERCPs) also were inconclusive. Both procedures involve a camera being forced down my throat and esophagus, while I was heavily sedated, to examine my pancreatic ducts and pancreatic functions. Every time a test came up inconclusive, it became that much more frustrating. If only we could find a cause for my illness, there might be a chance we could somehow find a solution. Slowly, the hope that we would find a cause faded, and we began the long search for a solution regardless of knowing what caused it.

It was actually at the Mayo Clinic, after an EUS, that my father and I were sat down and told that my recurrent pancreatitis, as we were calling it at that point, had developed into CP. Calcifications in my pancreas, which were visible on CT scans and during the EUS they had just performed, prompted the diagnosis. It was difficult not only because I heard that I now had a chronic disease, but I was halfway across the country away from most of my family and support system.

Please let me know what you think! I'm working hard daily on it. Hopefully it will be as good as I expect it to be!