Warning- Long and filled with arrrggghhh…
Fuck ME! I am so done with this shit I cannot take it anymore!
May 11th, whilst doing something mundane, changing a florescent light bulb at work, the old cranky bulb bursts into about a million fragments. I didn’t notice it right away, but after realizing my right eye was watering bloody tears I decided to have our OD take a look see. ( I work for an eye doctor)
After much rooting around he finds a tiny piece of glass, removes it, and everyone is thinking its going to be hunky dory from here on out. The next day my eye looks a little gooey and a teeny bit red, but still everything doesn’t look to bad.
Day three brings out the zombie girl. My eye was beet red, dumping copious amounts of discharge and I couldn’t see crap out of it. I trot myself off to an MD who over the course of a few days prescribes antibiotic eye goo for the corneal scratches I have treated myself to.
Day Five shows no retreat of the eye infection, but now I have developed a curious bulls-eye type rash with blistering around the eye. The MD suspects preseptal cellulits. Off to the ED I go! Wahoo! A cat scan later shows no leftover glass in my eye, and the evening doctor pooh poohs the rash as some slight impetigo and tells me to stop rubbing my eye. I tell him in no uncertain terms that rubbing my eye area feels like rubbing acid into my flesh, but he waves me off, and gives me an IV full of Augmentin, and an Rx of it to take home.
Day 6 dawns with a roaring sound. I am not even fully awake before I realize that I am bent over the thundermug puking my guts out, only to promptly flip around and shit like a goose. Calling the dispensing hospital gets them to tell me that augmentin is hard on your stomach. Try some yogurt! Still puking and periodically shitting but taking my antibiotics like a good little girl I notice that my stomach is itching me fiercely. I look down to see hives marching their way up my body like little teeny red soldiers. It’s now 2am so I decide to go to bed and make an appointment with my general doctor in the morning.
I show off my itchiness to a fillin doc who tells me I am allergic to the penicillin based drug even though I never have been before. This doctor also notes the weird blistering around my eye and dismisses it by guessing it is a heavy metal burn from the light bulb material. Even a slight breeze on my face makes me want to punch someone, but I take her scrip for an alternate antibiotic and walk out trying not to scratch my itchy ass in public.
The hives finally settle down after a week, my eye is looking better, but my face looks like I have somehow sunburned half of it, though the blistering is finally going away. A week after that, my regular doctor gets back from vacation and gives me a stronger antibiotic, this time with some pain pills. I bless her and her first born.
I go back to work for about a week looking like a red rashy faced zombiette. I feel terribly cute, and no one but NO one wants me to teach them how to put contact lenses in.
A week after that and a final oral antibiotic change and my doctor throws in the towel. It’s time for some IV antibiotics and a hospital stay.
My work is SO thrilled!
The hospital wasn’t so bad, it had cable and a nice private room, and the IV antibiotic seemed to be working, only about a quarter of my face was bright red and hot. I finally see an infectious disease specialist my second day there, who tells me that what I first had wasn’t some silly impetigo, it was cellulitis which set off SHINGLES. (No wonder it hurt so damn much) What I was dealing with now was a super-infection on top of the whole mess.
No worries though, the IV antibiotic has about the same bioavailibility orally as it does IV. I go home the next day, and wait to see her a week later.
No change. She ups the dose of the antibiotic.
A week later, my eyelid has a hard lump and it is swollen shut, and the infection is advancing down my face again. She tells me it’s time for a PICC line so I can have IV antibiotics at home. She sends me off to an ophthalmologist specialist who thankfully just thinks its the skin hardening from the cellulitis. He agrees however, it is time for a PICC line.
Four days are spent in limbo over the fourth of July as the doctors nurse is on vacation. I finally get the PICC line put in on the 5th of July. I drove myself, the boyfriend is still in the doghouse over this. I get home and go to show off my new tube into my body, and find the site dripping with gore. I call the hospital back, and since I am not bleeding to death, they want me to come in at 6:30 the next morning.
I spend the night soaking a bath towel in blood and goo.
The 6th I go in and they find the line has completely clotted. They thread a new one and I am on my way home just in time to meet the home care nurse who shows me my new pal. A wee IV pump that hangs in a little purse around my waist. It is attached 24/7 even though it only doses the antibiotics every 8 hours. About every ten minutes it gives a little beep and splurts a little juice through my line, just to keep it open. It takes me two days to figure out how to work the thing and how to change the bags of antibiotic juice out, along with flushing the line, and all that other fun stuff.
Also, I get to take a shower with my arm sticking out. It’s fun. Just loads.
The third day the nurse is there, my boss calls bitching that hospitals are calling her, am I to stupid to tell them the workman’s comp information? She then informs me that this is rather inconvenient as she has vacations to get in. She is skeptical that all of this is from a teeny piece of glass. I should be able to work with an IV bag she thinks. I am tempted to go rub my face on her, but I restrain myself.
Another week passes on the IV antibiotic, the home care nurse comes to check my vitals and is concerned that now the redness has passed the mid-line of my face. She calls the infectious disease doctor, and whammo, hospital stay round two. This time, she goes for the big guns and orders some Vancomycin. Apparently, I rate the MRSA grade stuff. Yippee!
Two days later, they straighten things out with home health, and now I get to dispense my own Vancomycin with a homepump, it is kind of neat. I don’t have to be hooked to it 24/7 and it looks like a grenade.
Four days later she sees me, and the rash is receding, though not as fast as she would like. She ups the dose to 1.5g every 12 hours. Meanwhile, I have developed a raging yeast infection. Also, workmans comp decides to send a nurse with me to my appointment with her. I can’t help but be irritated. I am trying to keep everyone informed. About this time, nearly a month after the injury, my claims adjuster finally sends me my paycheck, which is only 8o% before commission. But hey, at least it is money!
I am 4 days from finishing my Vancomycin run and I am getting excited, however, I wake up with an excruciating headache, followed up by a major body ache. Also, it seems for fun my feet and ankles are swollen to three times their size. When my lips and fingertips start turning blue, and I can’t chalk the shortness of breath up to my asthma, my boyfriend speeds me to the hospital, which is about 3 miles away. By the time he gets there, I am moaning in pain from my head, they get me in a room and it progresses to screaming.
The nurse tells me to calm down, that screaming will make everything worse and disturb the other patients. Luckily, I wasn’t coherent enough to tell her to shove it, I was begging anyone to make it stop.
After mucho painkillers, they still aren’t sure what is going on. My heart beat is all tachycardic, I am blue on oxygen, so the doctor decides to try for a spinal tap.
I know, I had no idea where the hell he was going with that either.
With all the painkillers, and muscle relaxers they try to have me sit on the edge of the bed. I do my best, but he isn’t able to get it in right, causing shooting pain down my legs, and to my great embarrassment, I wet myself thoroughly.
Luckily, at that point, I had an awesome nurse who cleaned me up, cleaned up the bed, held a bedpan between my standing legs when I gasped that I was going to go and couldn’t stop, and before I even knew it had the bed flipped up and a Foley catheter in. She reassured me that it wasn’t my fault the whole time and made me feel better. It didn’t hurt at all, and I was so relieved that I wasn’t going to wet the bed I could have kissed her.
The doctor told me that they were going to transfer me to a larger hospital that had better monitoring equipment as my heartbeat was still all over the map. I was so far gone at this point he could have transferred me to the moon. The ambulance service came, and abruptly hemmed and hawed and left apparently to get a bigger stretcher. I thought that was a little weird, I AM a big girl, about 250, but I didn’t think they needed the whale tarp.
About an hour later they came back, and transferred me to the other hospital where they found the next day after a succession of MRI’s and CAT scans that I had a blood clot in my lung. They kept me about a week, I gained nearly 45lbs of excess edema in my ass and thighs, threw them for a loop as I kept dropping my heart rate into the 30’s, but they finally let me go home.
Thing was, I felt terrible.
For nearly the last 15 years I have taken meds for anxiety. I haven’t had a problem with a panic attack in nearly 10 years. Even the death of both my grandparents and family squabbles haven’t caused it to rear it’s ugly head.
The night after I got home, alternately crying and terrified, I realized I was definitely loosing my shit. We went off to the ED again, this time for some extra great panic attack drugs.
It took a few days, but I now feel almost normal. Crowds and large noises still overwhelm me, but I think anxiety wise, it is getting better.
My face was looking great, the panic was getting better, they finally yanked the PICC line and I thought I was going to see the infectious disease doc for the final time. Two days before, the post herpetic neuralgia felt different. Tingly kinda, almost bubbly.
I walked into her office with a fresh case of blisters on my face. The panic attacks apparently set off round two of Shingles.
Godmotherfuckign dammit all to fresh hell. It has been almost three months. I have lost my summer, probably lost my job, lost my vacation because I cannot travel that far in the car without moving so soon after the blood clot. Can’t I catch a mother fucking break?
Please?
