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| Saturday January the First |
So I almost made it an entire year without a trip to the emergency room, bummer.
Monday, December the Twentieth I awoke at my normal waking hour of four a.m. feeling fine. Around nine while I was working I started feeling a little light headed feverish and exhausted so I sat down for a while. I got a disposable thermometer out of the safety closet and My temperature was about 100.5. I didn't think to much of it, slight fever, probably just coming down with a slight cold so I continued to work. The department I work in is pretty small so they all knew I was feeling a little ill but I told them I wasn't worried about it and I would be back at work the next morning. By the end of my work day I was feeling worse so I decided to just go home and rest.
I took my temperature again at home and it had risen to 101.7 so I took some nyquil and went to sleep. at six I woke up coughing so violently that I began vomiting. About an hour of that went by and then I was able to drink a few sips of water and go back to sleep. At one a.m. I woke back up coughing and throwing up. My head was splitting and my throat was so raw and swollen that I could not swallow a thing without being in terrible agony. The lymph nodes in my neck were also very swollen and sore.
Every time I would get back into bed I would feel nauseous so I made a pile of towels and clothes on my bathroom floor into a bed so I could lay down for a few minutes before having to heave my heavy head over the porcelain puke tub. Four a.m. came and that at least gave me something to: call work and tell them I was not coming in. But then it was 4:02 and all I could do was lay down, cough, puke, repeat.
I wasn't able to reach my doctors office until 9 tuesday morning and they told me to come in at 11:30. I was really dehydrated and every time I stood up I felt dizzy so my dad drove me to my doctor appointment. I really thought I'd be in and out; he'd look at me, look down my throat tell me I either have strep or the flu, give me some antibiotics and I'd be on my way. I didn't leave the doctors office until 2:45. The nurse took me to the examining room, took my vitals and I tried to tell her all the symptoms I was having. Speaking was very difficult because of how raw my throat was. My temperature was 103.5, I was sweating like a fat man in a sauna but I felt so cold. As she asked me the rest of the questions she has to ask before the doctor comes in I laid down on the exam table.
It took 30 minutes for the doctor to come in and I had already fallen asleep on the table. I was given a strep and flu test which both came back negative so they took some blood to do a white blood cell count. Because of my dehydration the nurse had a pretty hard time getting my blood, I started to feel like a pin cushion. A normal white blood cell count is 10,000 and mine was 25,000. They did a chest x-ray and decided I had pneumonia. Doctor gave me an antibiotic shot and a prescription for promethegan, an anti-nausea suppository, and told me to come back the next day.
I didn't sleep well Tuesday night but had not been throwing up since I had taken the anti-nausea medicine. Wednesday, although I had stopped puking, I did not feel any better, in fact my head hurt even worse and my neck was so sore that I could barely turn my head. When I mentioned this to the doctor he feared I had meningitis so he sent my to the Emergency room to get a lumbar puncture. On the drive to the ER from the doctor I look up meningitis on my smartphone and get a little nervous. There are two types of meningitis, viral and bacterial, the only way to test for it is a spinal tap. For viral meningitis there is no treatment but it is not too severe, it just has to run its course. Bacterial meningitis is deadly even with treatment.
When I got to my room in the ER blood was drawn, which again took several sticks before they could find any, both arms were stuck and then eventually blood was taken from the back of my hand. They gave me a few IV's was given to me which I desperately needed, I had not eaten or drank anything since Monday morning. I also received a few bags of antibiotics through my IV. They also did a throat culture for strep and a few other tests before the spinal tap.
I was bent over so my spine was fanned out and they first stick a little needle into your back to numb the skin and first layer of tissue, then they stick a bigger needle into the lower tissue and inject more numbing solution. After all the numbing they stick a needle in the is going to extract some of the fluid that surrounds the spine. I had been given some pain medication into my IV so I was a little lucid, but I could feel the needle when it was around the nerves of my spine. The Doctor had to try twice because he could not get any of the spinal fluid so they sent me to radiology so they could do it under an x-ray.
When I was in the x-ray machine I started to have doubts about the procedure when I heard the doctor ask if anyone knew how many CC's he was supposed to get and if it was going to bleed when he took the needle out. I was under so many pain meds at the time though that I just laid there silent. I was eventually diagnosed with viral meningitis. I was given a prescription for oxycodone and was sent home.
I started feeling a little better the next few days except for my back. After the lumbar puncture I have been having really bad pain in my back, the oxycodone helped with that though. Christmas weekend all I could really do is lay around doped up on pain killers and the doctor said I could return to work on Monday the twenty-seventh. I was not prescribed many of the pills because they said the pain should only last a few days. At work monday I had to leave early because of the pain I was in so I called to make another Dr appointment. That evening the hospital called me to tell me my throat culture had come back positive for strep. Tuesday I only had one pill left which I took before work and by ten o'clock was in so much pain I had to leave. My appointment was for two o'clock so I laid in bed after I got home from work until 1:30 and then drove myself to the doctors office. He prescribed me another weeks worth of oxycodone and said that if I am still in pain by the Wednesday the fifth of January I need to call him because they might have to do work on my back.
My throat still hurt a bit, but other than that I had been feeling a lot better. Thursday the thirtieth it started hurting to swallow again. Friday morning I woke up with all my symptoms back. I couldn't swallow, I had a fever, I was coughing so violently that I was throwing up, and my headache was back. I took an oxycodone and promethegan and called my doctor. I had to leave a message but they got back to me within half an hour and told me to go to the ER.
Back at the ER they gave me more IV's and a CT scan of my neck which revealed that I now have tonsillitis! The doctor at the ER gave me Clindamycin, an antibiotic, prednisone to shrink the swollen glands in my neck and tylenol with codeine for pain and to help ease off the oxycodone. I slept right through new years eve, I did not get to watch the ball drop.
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