Tags
#california, #congestiveheartfailure, #coronavirus, #doctor, #fever, #gallbladder, #hospital, #hospitalstay, #illness, #liver, #motrin, #mysteryillness, #newworld, #nottheflu, #organfailure, #PICCline, #prayer, #sepsis, #specialist, #surprise, #swelling, #symptoms, #team
It’s interesting how life can take us from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. Almost a year ago, the weekend before Thanksgiving, my life was at a high. I’d just won an Honorable Mention film festival award for a screenplay I’d written, and, suddenly, my whole existence felt validated. I attended the awards ceremony and spoke on stage. At a meet-and-greet, I vaguely remember one of the other award winners saying they had just flown in from somewhere out of the country right before the ceremony. I was so excited that things were finally lining up for me, and maybe, just maybe, my dreams would come true.
Unfortunately, my highest high quickly turned into my lowest low. The awards ceremony was on a Saturday night. The following Wednesday, while at work, I had chills and sat in my office with a space heater cranked up, trying to get warm.
As I left work that Wednesday, one of the guards asked me what my plans were for that Thanksgiving weekend. I’d shrugged and told him I had no plans and would just be hanging out. Little did I know, I would be fighting for my life for the next two weeks.
My chills continued into the evening so much so that I had to soak in a hot bath just so I could fall asleep with an electric blanket wrapped around me.
The next day, Thursday, was Thanksgiving, and I didn’t feel well. My family from Michigan called me in California on my brother’s portal, and I talked to them as I lay in bed. I only made it about ten minutes watching my niece and nephew do a little dance for me, and then I had to tell them that I didn’t feel well, and I had to go rest.
Later in the day, my neighbors invited me over for dinner, but I told them I didn’t feel up to it. One of them came over, she took my temp, informed me I had a fever and probably the flu, and to wait while she brought me some food.
On Friday, I peeled myself out of bed to take my senior dog to her acupuncture appointment. Hey, my dog has always been my priority even though I felt drained and weak. I laid on the mat next to her as she received her treatment, trying to hide how weak I felt. I kept a cool hand on my forehead in an attempt to ease the overwhelming heat and exhaustion I felt as the minutes ticked by slowly.
The vet thought I had the flu as well, so I called my doctor’s office. The receptionist asked me a few questions, spoke with the doctor, and told me not to come in because it sounded like the flu, and they didn’t want me spreading it to anyone else. At the doctor’s office’s advice, I stayed home in bed and ate the neighbor’s soup she brought me.
Saturday was Day 3 of the fever, and I wasn’t feeling any better. By Sunday, I called my friend, who is a nurse, and she informed me that fevers don’t usually last longer than three days. She said to drink lots of fluids and, if it got to the point that I couldn’t hold them down, to go to the ER right away.
Never having really been sick before, I thought it was just the flu and decided to man-up and wait it out at home.
By Monday morning, I was feeling pretty bad. I called in sick to work and decided to take myself to the hospital. As I was leaving, I saw the neighbor’s husband pulling out and told him where I was going. He said, “Why bother? It’s just the flu, and they’re just going to send you home.” I decided he was right, so I decided to man-up again and stay home for Day 5 of the fever.
By Tuesday, I called in sick to work again, and I was feeling really, really sick. I had upper abdominal pain and had to take several hot baths a day just to stay warm. As soon as I warmed up, I’d need an ice pack on my head because I’d get too hot. Back and forth, back and forth.
Around 11 p.m. Tuesday night, I tried to drink some water and vomited. I knew that I had to listen to my nurse friend’s advice and get to the ER. It was Day 6 of the fever. I waited until around 3:30 a.m., hoping all the gunshot wound folks would have cleared out of the ER by then. I fed my doggie, texted the dog walker, and took my first Uber ever to the closest hospital.
When I walked into the ER, there was only one other person there, so the stars had lined up for me. I told the lady at the front desk about my fever and overall ill feeling. She looked at me with a disgusted look and told me I probably had the flu, and they’d just send me home. I was feeling pretty ridiculous by now after having heard this so many times, but I stuck to my guns and said, “Well, could I please have someone see me? If I’m wrong and it’s just the flu…well, sorry.”
From here on out, things are a little blurry as I look back. I remember being put into a room, seeing a doctor who gave me a flu test that came back negative, and, the next thing I knew, I was laying on a table in the ER with a very handsome doctor squatting down to my eye level to talk to me. I remember his soft, hazel eyes filled with compassion, and I somehow felt everything was going to be okay. When the doctor told me his name, I asked him to repeat it. When he repeated it, I asked him to spell it because I couldn’t understand what he was saying with his heavy accent. He was dressed like a European soccer player and spoke with an accent I couldn’t identify, but he listened very carefully to every question I weakly answered. My friends know him as Dr. Handsome, and he stayed with me through this entire journey and is the one I would credit with saving my life.
Specialist after specialist came to visit me in what I think was 17 hours in the ER. It took two nurses four tries to get an IV needle into me because I was so dehydrated that they couldn’t hit a vein.
I remember a doctor looking at my arms and commenting on a rash.
“Huh?” I asked, lifting my head to look at the tiny pink dots that covered my forearms. When the doctor lifted my hospital gown to look at my abdomen, I was surprised to see the rash of tiny pink dots covering my tummy as well. Why had I never noticed them during my multiple baths a day? I collapsed back onto the bed, overwhelmed but feeling that I was in good hands.
I let out a couple of dry coughs.
“I’m concerned about that cough,” one of the specialists said.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I assured him. “It just started yesterday, and it’s not bad.”
Unassured, the specialist sent me for chest X-rays.
Hours later, as I flitted in and out of consciousness, I was informed that my gallbladder was inflamed, and they were taking me into surgery to remove it. Suddenly, things were moving faster, and they became more serious. No one from Michigan or California knew I was there. I needed to tell someone something, but I can’t remember how or who. Maybe I called my parents, maybe I texted my brother, maybe I texted one of my work friends, maybe I texted the neighbor who had brought me soup for days. I can’t remember. What I do remember was, at the door to the emergency room, they stopped because they’d just received additional tests that said not only was my gallbladder inflamed, but my liver was also inflamed and failing.
I was really surprised to hear this because, other than being a chocaholic who washed chocolate down with a little red wine, I was a healthy person. I exercised, climbed mountains, played tennis, and jogged in my down time. I didn’t have asthma or diabetes or any underlying conditions. How could my healthy body just flip a switch like this and start failing?
Wednesday and Thursday were spent in the ICU because the doctors had no idea what I had and didn’t know whether it was contagious. I remember Dr. Handsome coming in to see me early on Wednesday in the ICU, and I wondered if he’d even gone home to his family that night. Yep, he had a family. Even in my state of utter delirium, I had enough wherewithal to check for a wedding band. Sure enough, there was a wedding band, but I’m not going to say I didn’t still have a huge crush on him.
As Dr. Handsome again squatted down to my eye level to ask me a series of questions, I remember laying on my side and barely being able to nod my head. He told me that most of my organs were now inflamed and failing, including my heart and brain. When I looked in a mirror, I could see that my face was terribly swollen, and I’m guessing that was from the brain swelling. Dr. Handsome told me that I had sepsis, and they were going to put in a PICC line so they could pump both fluids and multiple antibiotics into me as well as use it to draw blood without poking me again.
I weakly asked Dr. Handsome what was causing my body to fail, and he said he had no idea, but he had a team of specialists that would be coming to see me throughout the day.
True to his word, I soon had a team of what seemed like 12 doctors, all with different specialties, coming in to see me. I remember an infectious disease doctor who was fascinated with my rash, a liver doctor, a heart doctor, a neurologist, an internal medicine doctor, and the rest of the list fades away in my mind.
By Thursday, my second day in the ICU, my brother made plans to fly out to see me since I was all alone in California.
A supervisor from work and her sister, a nurse, came to see me. You’ll understand how sick I was when I tell you my supervisor brought me two chocolate bars, and I wasn’t strong enough to eat them for well over a month! As my supervisor tried to chat with me, I noticed how, mid sentence, I would get stuck trying to come up with a word, and then I would completely forget what I was trying to say. Looking back, this was likely caused by the brain swelling, and it became a regular occurrence over the next few days.
On Friday, I still had a fever of around 104, but they didn’t think I was infectious to others, so they pulled me from the ICU and put me into my own hospital room. I’d been on a liquid diet the entire time I was in the hospital, my only solids being the Motrin and any other pills that wouldn’t go into my PICC line.
This might be TMI for you, but on Friday the “trots” started. When I told a nurse, they worried it might be C. diff and told everyone they needed to wear a gown, booties, and face mask when they were around me until the test results came back in two days. I totally felt like I had the cooties. Maybe I did.
My days were filled with scan after scan and test after test. By now, my cough had gotten so bad that I couldn’t lay down when they tried to slide me into what I think might have been an MRI tube. Every time I laid on my back, the coughing went out of control.
Having taken a million medical depositions, I was well aware of what sepsis was. It’s a very serious infection of the blood. All the people in my depositions who’d had it had died from it. I had a court reporter friend who had died from it. Was I scared or panicked? No. The odd thing about sepsis (or maybe it was all the morphine I was on) is that it makes you feel okay about dying. I hadn’t checked everything off of my bucket list yet, but I’d checked off more than most, so I wasn’t worried about dying. I remember thinking that, if I died, I’d be able to see my much-loved grandparents and my dog Nestle again, and I was okay with that. I didn’t want to struggle, and I didn’t want to fight. I was happy to have the option to just slip away to see my loved ones again.
I was too weak to take most phone calls or answer a lot of texts, so I tried to write one post a day on Facebook with updates so my family and friends would know what was going on.
One of my friends who had just been out to visit a month earlier told me that her dad was a doctor, and he liked helping out her friends. He wanted to talk to me and review my tests to see if he could give any insight. Dr. Handsome agreed, so yet another doctor, this one back in Michigan, was now on my team. I really appreciated my friend’s dad because, as handsome as Dr. Handsome was, I could only understand about 70% of what he said. It was really nice to have things explained by someone with a familiar midwestern accent.
As I realized I was quickly hitting rock bottom, a small urge to survive overrode the sepsis, and I did something I’ve never done before. I told my mom it was okay to add me to the prayer chain at our small, country church back home in Michigan. In the past, I’d always avoided the prayer chain because I’d viewed it more as a gossip chain; but now I realized that my body was not healing itself and, if I wanted to put off seeing Nestle and my grandparents for a while, I was going to have to pull out the big guns…or gun.
Friday night, after a visit from one of the bailiffs at work and his wife, my brother arrived around nine p.m. and came directly from the airport. After a short visit, he presented me with get-well cards made by three of my nephews. I loved those cards so much that I think I reread them every hour for the rest of my hospital stay and showed them to everyone who entered my room.
My brother stayed at my house and took care of my senior dog, Daisy, giving the dog walker, who had moved in, a couple days off. He told me how he cleaned and disinfected the entire house before he could even go to sleep. I guess I can’t blame him.
The next day, Saturday, my cousin in England asked if she could add me to their church’s prayer list, and I agreed. Maybe it was the added prayer, but, by midday Saturday, even though I still had a fever, I was begging Dr. Handsome to let me have some solid food. I was starting to perk up. Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences, but it can never hurt to have people on two continents praying for you.
Unfortunately, Saturday was also the day that one of the specialists told me that I was a “medical conundrum,” and they had no idea what was wrong with me or how to fix it. To top that off, Dr. Handsome told me that I now had water around my heart. To me, that just sounded like my heart was taking a little bath. Kinda relaxing, right?
Dr. Handsome wanted to give me a diuretic to remove the excess water. When he told me the diuretic would make me tinkle every 15 minutes for hours, I brought out my negotiating skills and asked him if we could wait a day to see if the water went away on its own. I knew I couldn’t walk to the bathroom that often. I might as well just set up camp in there. Upon hearing my request for a delay, I remember Dr. Handsome got a deer-in-the-headlights expression and then looked around as if to see if he was on Candid Camera. He succumbed to my request, and I figured I still had a few flirting skills left in my A game…until I looked in the mirror.
I had not showered in four days that were filled with fever sweats. My hair was piled in a horribly messy bun on top of my head, my face was swollen, my lips were cracked despite numerous applications of Victoria’s Secret lip gloss, and my eyes were slits. I looked down at my hands, and they were swollen but not as badly as my feet. My feet were H-U-G-E, HUGE! I was a total mess. I don’t think I have ever looked less attractive.
When my brother came back to visit that afternoon, I proudly told him how I’d negotiated a wait on the diuretic to relieve the water around my heart.
“Why would you do that?” my brother asked. “You have congestive heart failure!”
“Huh? No, my heart is just taking a little bath.”
“No,” my brother continued. “It’s congestive heart failure, and that’s what Grandma had and died from.”
Now I felt shocked. I remembered my grandma struggling with stairs and getting easily winded, and I suddenly realized how serious things were. Perhaps I had chosen the wrong thing to negotiate.
Watch for Part 2 of “Breath of Death.”
I’ve turned my award-winning screenplay from that fateful weekend into a book. It’s called “The Other Christmas List,” and it’s available on Amazon.