sick, part II

My doctor ordered me to the hospital when he heard I had a sore neck and headache. The headache, I was convinced, was from severe dehydration. I hadn’t been hungry in days and drinking was difficult. But never tell a doctor you have a sore neck and headache – he was afraid of meningitis, but when I got to the hospital everyone was distracted by my elevated heart rate of 175 – more than double what’s normal. They tried everything to lower it, including stopping my heart. The nurse in charge said “You’re going to feel a little flush.” What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I’d like to know exactly what they’re thinking when they say “flush” in a situation like that. What I felt is that I was dying – couldn’t breathe, everything in my chest seized up. They didn’t even tell me they were stopping my heart – yet another example of hospital personnel giving out falsely sunny information.

But backtracking a moment: before I wound up in the hospital I’d emailed my doctor saying I’d had this fever for several days and asking if I should be worried. I went to see him. He thought I might have Lyme disease and gave me fluids and antibiotics. The next night I collapsed in the bathroom in the middle of the night. I laid there a long time trying to figure out whether I cared. The moving friend that I wasn’t help move was staying at my house in between apartments and so there was someone there I could yell to. I was lying on the cool part of the floor reeling with dizziness and feeling particularly nauseated. It didn’t seem to make much sense to call out for help when I was just going to want to stay in the bathroom. After I’d laid there for a while and felt pretty certain I could go back to bed without throwing up I summoned my friend who was pretty alarmed to find me on the floor (“where are you?”). When morning dawned that next day I dictated emails to her for me because my fingers were too swollen and stiff to type. I could barely make it up and down there stairs by that point and really sympathized with my friend who’d complained years ago that I didn’t have a bathroom on the first floor (her paralysis from a high school car accident makes stairs a bitch). The email I sent to the doctor was what made him order me to the hospital. When my staying-here friend came down stairs with the phone in her hand I knew I was in trouble. I argued that I did not want to go to the hospital. And when I finally gave in, I insisted on having spaghetti first. I knew I’d not get any good food there, and I was finally a little bit hungry.

So after spaghetti we went to the hospital where my elevated heart rate had everyone running around madly. I went in through the emergency room and I have to admit that when I was finally hooked up to fluids and in that tiny room where you hold court I did feel some measure of relief. The exhaustion and the dehydration were really flattening me and I knew I’d at least be taken care of there. No one ever figured out why my heart rate was so rapid, several doctors and nurses told me I’d have to worry about it for years. No one could figure out what was wrong with me and when I finally went into the actual hospital part of the hospital I was on the one-step-down from intensive care ward. Because they didn’t know what I had. They figured I had some kind of infectious disease, but which one? There are so many.