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#blog, #breathofdeath, #congestiveheartfailure, #doctor, #health, #hospital, #illness, #kristiedickinson, #mysteryillness, #organfailure, #recovery, #sepsis, #sick, #symptoms
I think my brother had been expecting to take me home from California in a body bag, but that didn’t happen. Fortunately.
On Saturday, one of my friends from work went to Costco for me and bought a bunch of the potatoes, organic sweet potatoes, and organic green beans I used to make Daisy’s food. She dropped it off to my brother when she visited me at the hospital, and my brother took it home and prepared a massive amount of Daisy food for my dog-sitter, who had moved into my house.
By Saturday afternoon, another friend from hiking came to visit and ran out to get some scrambled eggs, pancakes, and clean underwear for me. I tease him now because the underwear he got me were about as huge as my swollen feet and went halfway up my rib cage. I was desperate for anything clean, so I wore them.
Sunday morning, my brother left at four a.m. to catch a flight home out of LAX, and I tried to get some rest. The odd thing about this fever and sepsis is that you don’t really sleep. I hadn’t slept more than a light doze for a few minutes in a week. I couldn’t sleep, and my body couldn’t heal itself.
I was now obsessed with Motrin. The minute I started to feel the least bit warm, I would call a nurse, have her take my temperature, and give me more Motrin. Motrin kept the fever symptoms at bay, and I was terrified that the deep chills and sweats would return. Some well-meaning friends had given me Tylenol for my fever Thursday through Tuesday, and the doctors said it caused severe damage to my liver; so Motrin was my new friend.
On Sunday, still fever stricken but craving a shower, one of my besties from work came to visit me. She brought a duffel bag with a blow dryer, shampoo, lotion, conditioner, protein shakes, and other goodies.
My Michigan doctor had pointed out to Dr. Handsome how completely malnourished I had become, according to my blood tests, and he suggested protein shakes. I drank the shakes and tried to order healthy food from the hospital menu like lentils and dark green veggies. Surprisingly, the hospital menu doesn’t offer a lot of healthy food, so I got the same thing every day, trying to get some strength back.
On Sunday, not only did I succumb to the diuretic, but my C. diff test came back negative, so people no longer needed to wear gowns and masks around me. No more cooties!
Sunday night, I woke up from my usual half-sleep feeling warm. I called for a nurse and asked for more Motrin. When she took my temperature, she said I didn’t have enough of a fever to warrant giving me more Motrin. What? No! I was sure it was going to come back at any moment, and I needed my Motrin before chills set in, darn it! How would I ever get warm in this cold hospital? But the nurse refused, and I eventually dozed a bit for the first time since my admission.
By Monday morning, one of my favorite clients from Michigan called me and asked me to call his nephew, who was a doctor at Cedars-Sinai in LA. I did as I was told, and the nephew doctor asked me if I could drive up to Cedars-Sinai to see him. I explained my situation because, obviously, he didn’t realize how bad things were. Walking five feet to the bathroom was a huge ordeal that took 20 minutes because my steps were so tiny, and I kept becoming entangled in the multiple IV lines and monitors I was hooked up to. I couldn’t walk out of that room much less drive!
The nephew doctor asked a few questions and then imparted this advice: You need to walk and move around, or you could develop blood clots if your limbs are that swollen. I looked down at my sausage fingers and toes and knew he was right. Just another thing I’d picked up in the million medical depositions I’d taken in my career: Blood clots.
Before I presented myself to folks in the hallway for a walk, I showered. The nurse had to put a stool in the shower for me, and I can’t tell you how difficult that shower was. My arms didn’t want to hold up the shower wand, and I spent a lot of the time just leaning against the wall. Drying my hair was no easier than showering. In fact, the hall walk was put off until I rested for a few hours.
When I finally dragged my “medical conundrum” butt that was now 14 pounds lighter (but you couldn’t tell because of all the swelling) into the hall, I had to pull along my IV pole and lean against the wall to move. It was H-E double toothpicks, as Maynard would say, but I didn’t want blood clots, so I again had to man-up and move myself down the hall. It took over 30 minutes to go maybe 20 yards and back, but I vowed to try it again later to keep pushing myself in hopes of getting stronger.
Monday afternoon, two more friends from work came to visit. It’s funny…I’d always thought I was all alone in California, but you’d be surprised who will show up for you when you really need it.
Even more surprising, Monday afternoon, one of my favorite judges showed up wearing her robe to visit me! She brought me a poinsettia and wished me the best. All I remember is telling her that I’d been in the hospital for six days. I teared up after she left because I was not only very touched by her visit, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it out of there if judges were coming for a last visit.
By Monday late afternoon, some of my other neighbors had heard of my hospitalization and stopped by for a visit.
Dr. Handsome was running late on his rounds that day but, when he showed up around 8:00, I was shocked to hear him say, “Your fever has broken. I’m going to discharge you.”
“My what?” I asked, not believing what I was hearing.
“I can’t keep you here any longer. Your fever is gone.”
“But I can barely walk,” I argued, terrified at the thought of being without my PICC line and the assurance that someone would be there if I needed them. “And I’m still coughing like crazy.”
“The cough is from the congestive heart failure,” Dr. Handsome informed me. “I want you to come to my office tomorrow morning.”
I was terrified and overwhelmed. I could barely walk or shower. How would I get to his office the next day? How would I survive on my own? What would I do without my beloved PICC line? What if I died at home and no one found me and my dog ate me? As seems to be the motto in this story, I had to man-up and do it. Dr. Handsome wouldn’t send me out into the now-December night if I couldn’t survive…right? It was November when I had gone into the hospital.
My wonderful neighbors picked me up and took me home, stocking my kitchen with homemade food that I could only eat tiny amounts of at a time.
Sleeping at home alone was scary, but I was exhausted. In six days, I’d only slept a little bit the last night in the hospital, and I was oddly awake, yet not present the rest of the time. Every time I laid down, I would begin to cough, so I had to prop up pillows to keep me at a nearly upright angle as I slept. The diuretic caused me to get up often; and, each time I went from that angle to a fully-upright sitting position on my bed, my heart would clench and stop for seconds that seemed like minutes. When it started again, I would rise and head to the restroom. I kept the upstairs hallway light on all night, and it’s something that I only stopped doing in August 2020, nine months later.
Knowing I was going to see Dr. Handsome the next day, I forced myself to shower, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. As is always the case, the hardest things turn out to be the best things. When Dr Handsome walked in and saw me perched on his examination table, he said, “Wow, you look good! I would not even recognize you on the street!” Well, of course that was enough to keep me showering for a long, long time.
Dr. Handsome listened to my heart and palpated my abdomen. When he pushed on my liver and gallbladder, instead of sharp pain, this time it was only a mild pain. Somehow, I knew I’d turned a corner.
When Dr. Handsome told me to come back in a week, I again panicked. What if something happened? I’d never been away from him that long. I wanted to stay at the hospital. Dr. Handsome seemed to think that, just because I showed up looking a lot better than I had in the hospital, that I was healed. I was struggling every time I moved, and curled hair does not mean I’m ready to jog a mile. I didn’t have the same confidence Dr. Handsome had, but I sucked it up and shuffled out of his office.
One of my friends from Michigan who now lives in California drove me to Dr. Handsome’s office that day and then out to lunch. I shuffled along with teeny-tiny steps, leaning on whatever I could find. My friend stood close by and patiently offered an arm as I moved like I was 98 years old.
Later that day, I started setting goals. I set a goal to walk around the lake in my association. Then I set a goal to push my dog in her stroller around it. Then I set a goal to partly jog around the lake pushing the stroller. Considering the fact that it was everything I could do to walk my senior dog two houses down and back, these seemed like lofty goals at the time; but the blood-clot story stuck in my mind, and I became determined to move forward.
I think my first day back at work was a Friday. I was nowhere near strong enough to return, but I’d run out of sick time my first two days in the hospital and, financially, had no choice but to return. I remember shuffling out of the parking ramp incredibly slowly carrying my very heavy laptop. My friend who’d brought the duffel bag to me in the hospital caught up and offered to carry my laptop. There were three benches between the parking ramp and the courthouse, and I had to stop to rest on each bench. By the third, I’d teared up and said to my friend, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to climb mountains again. I can’t even walk into work.” Truly, I was so weak that I did not see how I could ever recover to my previous strength.
I was an exhausted zombie at work the rest of the day, but I rested over the weekend and, Monday, I only had to stop at two benches when walking into the building. When the guards at the door greeted me with a “Good morning,” one followed up with, “Where ya been?”
“Really sick,” I said as I shuffled inside at a snail’s pace. I would lean my upper body on the hallway walls as I shuffled along, and everything was a blur.
As fate would have it, my supervisor called me my first day back and told me that a trial transcript from a year ago had been ordered, and they wanted it ASAP. When I opened the files, I was dismayed to see that it was well over 1,000 pages. How would I ever get this done in time for them?
I believe everything happens for a reason. I lost thousands of dollars when I missed work due to my illness, and, voila, here came this lengthy transcript that they wanted expedited. “Expedited” means that I can charge more to move them to the front of the line and get their transcript done sooner than regular turnaround time. That wasn’t saying much because my current turnaround time felt like it would be a month. Instead of resting per Dr. Handsome’s orders, I worked lunch hours, nights, and weekends and pushed through, finishing the job just in time and recouping my lost salary. Maybe that could be counted as a little miracle.
Speaking of coincidences and reasons, it’s funny how my fever broke about 24 hours after people started praying for me on a second continent. It’s funny how, to this day, the doctors have no idea what I had and what caused it to turn around. I’m thinking that maybe God has kept me around for a reason.
I lost 14 pounds in that week in the hospital, and I spent the next five months working to regain my strength and then pushing my body to get as strong as it could. When the Covid shutdown happened, I was horribly worried that my body’s immune system had not yet recovered, and I would not survive Covid if I got it. I hid out, ate a healthy diet, and exercised so that, if my body had to fight again, it would be ready.
In a follow-up visit, Dr. Handsome told me that, when Covid first hit, he had called the lab to see if they still had my blood. I’d had every symptom of Covid except the lung fill. When the lab didn’t have my blood any longer, he asked me to take an antibody test once they came out. I think it was April or May when I finally took the antibody test, and I was shocked that it came back negative. That could mean several things: One, I had one of the first Covid cases in the US, and it was a different strain; two, my Covid antibodies went away in the five months between the illness and the test; or, three, I never had Covid but instead had something that will remain one of the unanswered questions of the universe.
While in the hospital, I learned that the only way to detect whether something is a virus is to do a spinal tap. Saturday or Sunday, they wanted to do a spinal tap on me, but my platelet count was too low, and they worried I would bleed out. So maybe we’ll never even know whether what I had was a virus or something else. Maybe some mysteries were meant to go unsolved.
Regardless, I’m thankful to still be here, and I’m thankful for Dr. Handsome and my team of doctors. I’m thankful for my brother who took the time and made the effort to visit me, and I’m thankful for all the friends who came out of the woodwork that let me know that I really wasn’t as alone in The New World as I thought I was. I’m also thankful for all of the prayers from around the world that maybe led to a few miracles.
Some side effects carried on long after my recovery. Around May and June, I started losing hair. A lot of hair. I initially blamed it on a new shampoo, but now I see that hair loss is one of the after-effects of Covid, so who knows. My heart took the longest to recover, often clenching up when I’d try to pick up my running pace. After an August stress test, I was finally cleared of heart issues; and I can only hope that is the last aftershock.
Now it’s time to work my way back up from my lowest low and, hopefully, hit a new high in life. I’ve set new goals and have become more aggressive about checking things off of my goal list now versus waiting until I retire. Why? Because you never know when you’re going to run out of time. It could be just around the next corner; and, shoot, I’ve got some things I need to do before I see Nestle and my grandparents again.
I believe life was not meant to look back and have regrets. I don’t want to reach the end of my road and say, “I wish I’d tried that,” “I wish I hadn’t been so afraid,” “Why didn’t I follow that dream?” “Why didn’t I try harder?” or “Why didn’t I take a chance on love?” I already regret not trying out to become one of Michael Jackson’s back-up dancers. Michael’s gone, and I’ll never get that chance. What other opportunities had I let pass me by because I was afraid or worried about what others would think? After my hospital ordeal, my overall conclusion is: I’ve got a lot of stuff to do!
May you all live each day following your dreams and not putting them off until a tomorrow that may not come.
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