A Rough Couple of Days

[danceswithgary]

I'm pretty sure I've never ended up in the emergency room twice in less than two weeks before now. I could have lived quite happily without setting that personal record.

The first was the UTI that wouldn't die, finally solved by the right antibiotic. I finished those this past Thursday, life should have been great, but no.... I had my yearly with my gynecologist on Wednesday. Place really wasn't crowded, I tried not to touch anything with my bare hands and washed them scrupulously immediately afterward.

Thursday, I started running a higher-than-my-normal fever and my entire body ACHED. Great. A call to my primary doctor revealed he was sick, but they tentatively scheduled for Friday.

I suggested to Gary that he call the bridge group and let them know I might have something contagious and give them a chance to cancel. They're all in their late fifties or older and having them at our house for the monthly game didn't seem like a great idea to me. Yeah, right, whatever.

I spent Thursday night in bed trying not to cry from the pain and cursing the selfish idiot I married. The last thing I wanted to do was emerge from my lair and be greeted by his bridge-playing friends - I was really in no condition for that but my bladder disagreed on the length of my exile. I scurried as fast as my aching body could go and managed to avoid speaking to anyone. By the time everyone was gone, it was midnight and Gary stood by the bed and asked me what he could do to help. I resisted saying 'fuck off and die' but it was close.

I did not have a good night and then we got a call in the morning saying my doctor wasn't going to make it into the office. Not really wanting to go to the ER if I could avoid it, Gary looked up urgent care centers and got the addresses and times. Silly me, I thought he actually wrote them down. In the meantime, I'd improved slightly and thought that maybe I'd just picked up some twenty-four hour thing. Urgent Care went into the maybe tomorrow if I'm worse when Gary assured me they were open on the weekend, too.

Of course, around dinnertime it struck again even worse than before with the addition of coughing. I hadn't really eaten much Thursday or Friday due to nausea, just tried to make sure I was drinking fluids. That resulted in a feverish shaky Val attempting to cough up a lung most of the night, with a bonus headache from hell. I treated the symptoms, this is not the first time I've developed bronchitis overnight. It was a very long night.

I finally roused from a feverish doze to hear Gary saying the urgent care place he'd found opened at 8 AM, so I dragged myself out of bed, showered off the icky sweat and stumbled downstairs to not eat breakfast and to skip my morning meds. My stomach threatened to make me pay if I tried. I asked Gary to get my purse from upstairs, because it was too heavy for me to carry, while I put on my coat. He often carries it for me, I bought one that's very 'masculine' a black messenger bag so he wouldn't be embarrassed. This is not a new thing for him to do for me.

He brings it down and LEAVES IT ON THE COUCH to walk me outside.

That would be the purse with my PDA, my cell phone and, most importantly, my printed list of meds because I take too many to keep the names and dosages straight.

Off we went to urgent care, except Gary managed to mix all the addresses up in his head and, as I noted previously, he didn't write them down. You know, having your husband grovel for being an asshole the night before is meaningless if the chore he decides to do is totally mucked up, and yes, I should have done it myself.

Urgent Care Number One: He was pretty sure it was on Lee Road, but it wasn't the name he remembered and why would there be two urgent care centers in the same building (one is private insurance). Maybe we should go find a phone book and look them up again. *sigh*

Urgent Care Number Two: Oh, it was Long Pond. Great. Got to that one at 9:45 and it's closed - no weekend hours. Gary's protests to the contrary mean nothing when it's clearly marked Monday-Friday on the door.

Urgent Care Number Three: Opens at 11:00 and happens to be the one on Lee Rd that Gary had rejected initially. I forced myself to stop sighing because it just made me cough harder.

Emergency Room: It's on the way to the Urgent Care and I will have to wait forty-five minutes for Urgent Care to open, presuming they will open. I'm getting sicker by the minute, so Gary takes the chance that the ER won't have a long wait time because the parking lot is pretty empty. The ER is green (less than an hour wait). SCORE!

Wait, where's my purse?

I was too exhausted at that point to do anything except groan and shuffle inside.

I put on the mask they handed me the minute they heard the word 'coughing' and ended up getting into triage in less than thirty minutes. How nice it was that they could pull a copy of my meds list from last week's visit. I decided to only kill Gary half-dead when I could spare the breath and my head no longer felt like it was going to fall off. Blood pressure was sky-high (183/110) and the fever 102 with the ear thermometer, but only 99 orally (taking quick, short breaths through your mouth for hours to help control nausea will do that) so the final verdict was reached in the treatment room using oh how wonderful, you guessed it, and that was 103. I won the lottery - I really was sick and not wasting their time being a whiny hypochondriac!

The nurse botched the in-case-we-need-it-IV so that there was blood everywhere, but they managed to take enough for cultures galore. Then a chest x-ray (clear) and no I really couldn't take a deep breath for them because I would cough, no, fuck, an emesis basin came in handy, one nearly large enough to hold a lung. I agreed it was gross.

I waited another hour for a doctor to appear and inform me that although I was presenting with classic flu symptoms, there was clearly something else going on since my white blood cell count had tripled from last week's blood tests and he kept asking 'are you sure you're not feeling any abdominal pain outside pulling every muscle in your torso coughing?' No, I wasn't, and believe me, I'd have told him if I were.

Okay, then the diagnosis is just bronchitis that could end up pneumonia but he thought they caught it early enough. They screwed around figuring out what meds to give me for another hour and then I realized I missed the newsletter deadline and I really should have asked someone to take it for today but I hadn't expected Gary to drive us all over the city only to end up in the ER anyway. Then Gary popped up and made his best contribution of the day. "What about the pain? She's been taking Tylenol, but it's really not working."

Thank the gods that Percocet is not a codeine-derivative and I can't wait to take my next one because I actually fell asleep for an hour in the treatment room after taking that wonderful pill and I'm looking forward to sleeping tonight.

Back home finally at 5:00PM. Gary dropped me off then went to pick up the prescriptions. I quick posted an apology and the short newsletter, and I could finally relax in my chair for a bit and read my flist and try really hard not to cough.

I've really had enough of ER's for a while, not to mention going out in public where I'm exposed to other people's germs.

Oh great. I have to go pick up my new glasses next week. You know, I really do need that bubble.