Everything started on Wednesday January 10th as I was riding the bus to work, my eyes would not stop watering. I did not give it much thought until the next morning when I woke up with my eyes swollen shut. I was feeling achy and feverish so I took the morning off. I did go in to work in the afternoon but by the next morning was wayyy too sick to get out of the house. My eyes were worse, I was feeling nauseous, shivering uncontrollably even when buried under piles of blankets.
The next day which was a Saturday I decided to go to a clinic. I waited five hours to be told by some idiot to drink Gatorade and take Tylenol alternating with Advil every two hours. I did as told and swelled up like a water balloon, I was also having trouble breathing and was feeling nauseous. By Monday I called my own doctor who saw me right away and sent me to have blood tests and a chest X-ray. The results came in on Wednesday. Kidneys and thyroid were working fine, but liver functions were off and there was water in my lungs…he was mystified but suggested I take some diuretics to get the eye swelling down.
By Friday I was worse, weak, nauseous, out of breath, my belly was swollen, I looked like a boxer after a KO, I was shivering during the day and sweating buckets at night. My doctor suggested I go to the hospital emergency. We chose one that is specialized in exotic illnesses.
Within 15 minutes of walking in there I was admitted and given a gown and assigned a stretcher. I must have been delirious because it looked to me like a spa. Everyone had a pretty yellow cabana, with sides fluttering gently in the breeze, sun streaming through the yellow fabric. I felt we were surrounding a big pool and were all waiting for our personal masseuse or someone to show up with a tray of exotic drinks. Instead it was first a cart with an electro cardiogram machine, then someone with a tray full of empty glass bottles that they dutifully filled with my blood. They re did all the blood tests then the X-rays. Because there was still water in the lungs they briefly assigned me to pneumology but quickly decided the liver malfunction was more important so I fell into the capable hands of the gastro team. Nonetheless this did not give me access to a room in a ward upstairs…. not yet anyway.
I was sent to the emergency observation, which is more like a cellblock than the spa, while they looked for what they expected to be a hepatitis virus. And look they did! Through vial after vial of blood that they collected daily…but to no avail….there was no hepatitis virus to be found so they figured it might be a “mechanically” provoked hepatitis, so they started looking for stones or blockage of some sort. They did X-rays, then an hour long ultra sound, then they injected me with iodine to do a scan, then with radio active material to do some nuclear medicine thing (imagine lying without moving on a metal board for two hours, 30 minutes of it with your head taped to the table). I expected to glow in the dark after that one!…still nothing…. by then I had developed terrible back pain so they gave me morphine…for a while I could feel no pain! But then a blinding headache developed (I was later to learn that some people react that way to morphine but at the time no one saw the connection). They referred me to neurology who did a head scan. You will be happy to learn that I have a brain and that it is normally constituted and that my frequent headaches are textbook migraines…. so the answer was not there but they did see a lot of enlarged lymph nodes all along the neck as well as in the abdomen…By then I had gone through, pneumo, gastro, microbiology, neurology…and they were still at a loss. So I gave them another clue: I developed a very bad sore throat. So off to the ear throat and nose specialist I went. They had the gall to shove a camera up my nose TWICE! This is a fine form of torture if I ever saw one! But…. it did show that the back of my throat was very infected and every possible gland was swollen beyond recognition. As they were typing their observations on the computer some more blood tests results came in…. and one caught their eye: they had spotted a mononucleosis antibody. VOILA! They had their diagnosis. I was therefore given over to the infectious disease department. Wooohoo is there anyone I have not tried?? Save for the vet?
Mono is rather rare in adults and because my symptoms did not develop in the usual order they had a harder time figuring it out. I spent 6 days in the emergency ward, through a gastro epidemic that I managed not to get infected with. It was rather hellish. The stretcher was too short so my legs and feet stuck out at the end. You are basically lying on a board of black plastic so of course if you run a fever you are quickly soaked. They do not change beds in the emergency ward unless you are bed ridden and have totally soiled everything, so I relied on visitors to change my sheets and watch my things while I ran to the bathroom down the hall (wearing rubber gloves so as not to catch anything from door knobs or toilet seats). We were three to a room so in 6 days I saw a lot of people.
An elderly woman who had gastro and had to ring her bell and wait to get cleaned up by attendants who acted as if she did this on purpose. Every doctor who stopped by asked her if she really did not want to be resuscitated should she take a turn for the worse. I felt so bad for her. She was totally lucid and made sense but few people took the trouble to listen to what she had to say.
Then there was the snobby lady who kept asking why she had been put in this awful room! (Thank YOU very much!) But she was also a sad case as I found out she had only one sister in life who seemed in a bad state and she was worried about leaving her all alone. She had to rely on friends to organize her funeral and she did not seem to have too many of those either.
After the two ladies left, 2 young men joined me. One had cystic fibrosis but he drank and did drugs so that always landed him back in the hospital. Everyone knew him.
The other one had a girlfriend who tried to spend the night in the stretcher with him…how uncomfortable must THAT be! He never took off his wollen hat, but I found out it was in part due to the fact that he was constantly sneaking outside for a smoke, creating quite a stir when nurses started looking for him!
Finally, I got a semi private room in a ward and stayed there another five days. Those are double rooms with real beds and your own toilet!!!! True luxury! Because I was coming from the emergency ward we were put in isolation for 48 hours! Which meant that anyone entering had to put on a special paper gown, gloves and a mask. My poor daughter did that so many times! She was a pro at it and instructing everyone on how to do it properly. Isolation also meant I was not allowed out of the room …for a shower!!!! I was waiting at the door like a sprinter waiting for the shotgun on the morning the isolation was taken off (and I knew it was only for a short time because as soon as a new patient arrived we would be back in isolation again.)
My first roommate was a nice quiet lady who was very patient with a totally stupid student nurse who kept asking her the same questions over and over while I had gotten the whole story after 5 minutes of listening to her. She had had a pain in the leg. Her doctor had prescribed a pain medication that had made her dizzy. She fell and landed in hospital. The doctors had figured it out, taken her off the meds and given her an epidural, which was hopefully supposed to relieve her of her pan for several months. End of story! But the nurse kept saying: ”are you anxious about falling again? Do you have help at home? Should you get a walker? What if you fall again? Have you planned for that?” Over and over and over! I was ready to strangle her!
After her departure, my next roommate was anything but quiet! He was wheeled in swearing and screaming, requesting the bathroom where he made the most disgusting noises. Thank god someone went in after him and disinfected the place, as I never heard him wash his hands or flush the toilet all the time I was there. He was obviously having problems urinating so they attempted to put a urinary probe…He screamed so loud he scared half the floor! The next day a more experienced nurse came in and succeeded to install one quickly all the while talking to him and keeping him calm. One hoorah for experience! (Like the nurse who came in to install my IV line saying: “I brought an extra kit in case I mess up the first time”…and sure enough she did! I have the bruise to prove it!!) But from then on he would ring the bell constantly to ask to go to the bathroom. Obviously there was no need but he was so adamant that a lot of the younger staff gave in foolishly so the next time he would yell: “well your colleague took me earlier so why wont you????” Again it took a senior nurse to explain once and for all that the urine was coming out into the bag and there was nothing he could do about it…. But he would get confused at night and would raise a fuss every few hours. Surprisingly, contrary to emergency ward where someone came as soon as you rang, up in the wards they took forever to respond, which infuriated him all the more so he would swear and yell….Of course afetr all that, he would sleep all day and the staff had the hardest time waking him for meals or treatments and he would be totally incoherent when the doctors came in to question him! I had trouble sleeping when I got home, missing his cussing and swearing….
Although there is no treatment for mono, my throat was so swollen that I could not swallow thus drink nor eat. They had to put me on an IV to hydrate me and to give me some cortisone to get the swelling down. Once that was under control, I got sent home. After 11 days!
I stayed at my mothers for 48 hours until I was able to stand and walk by myself and am now home with orders to rest until I feel better.
END OF THIS ADVENTURE!!!