My 22 year daughter has been in abdominal pain for approximately 6 months. In March she was hospitalized and after numerous test they did an appendectomy. Within several months she was hospitalized with the same symptoms and tested again. This time they took her gall bladder. 13 days later she was hospitalized again with acute constipation (no BM since the surgery). They got this problem taken care of but now 1 week later she is having abdominal pain again and can not keep any food in her system. We are trying to get her an appointment with an internal medicene physcian but we are having problems finding a physcian that will accept her insurance. Please help!
I'm sorry to hear about your daughters pain. Abdominal pain can be very tricky to control and even more troublesome to attain the correct diagnosis. I would definitely make an appointment to see you Primary care physician and have a physical exam performed. I would also suggest a CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis to rule out any underlying pathology. If both of these are inconclusive, but she is still having pain, you may want to see an interventional pain specialist. Options I would offer, assuming no pathology, would be to perform a differential epidural. A differential epidural is when a pain specialist places an epidural catheter into the space right outside the spinal cord. The catheter is then dosed with specific concentrations and amounts of different local anesthetics. This method will allow your pain physician to tell if the pain is muscular (abdominal wall related), visceral (organ related) or if there is some other underlying cause to the pain. I hope she feels better, and I hope this answer was helpful to you.