The first time the pain came back after my first hospitalization, I sat on the bathroom floor at 3 AM doing math on whether to call an ambulance.
Was this it again? Or was it gas, or something I ate, or my body just being dramatic? When you’ve had necrotizing pancreatitis, every twinge in your upper abdomen asks the same question. Is this the start of the thing that nearly killed me.
Get it wrong one way and you’re in an ER waiting room for six hours with indigestion. Get it wrong the other way and you wait out something that needed a hospital.
After two hospitalizations and a handful of flares in between, I can mostly tell now. There are signs. Where the pain sits, whether it radiates to your back, what it does when you change position, what it does over the next few hours, what your body is saying alongside it. A flare and a full attack stop feeling identical once you know what you’re feeling for.
I built a protocol for the first 72 hours of a flare. What to do at home in the first few hours. What’s in my kit before anything starts. The specific signs that mean stop managing this yourself and get to a hospital now. And what to write down afterward, because every flare teaches you something about your own pattern if you pay attention.
I’m not going to list symptoms here and have you self-diagnose off a blog post. That’s the kind of half-information that gets people hurt. When the pain genuinely scares you, you call for help. Always.
The full 72-hour protocol, the home kit, and the escalation rules are in the book. If you’ve ever sat on a floor at 3 AM doing that math, you know why I wrote it.
Get the book → pancreaszen.com/book
I’m a patient, not a doctor. This is my experience, grounded in the medical literature. If you think you’re having an attack, treat it as a medical emergency and get help.