. . . and pleurisy ain’t no fun either.
A couple of weeks ago I woke in the night with chills and sweating. Took my temperature the next morning, and sure enough, I had a low grade fever. Terrific. I also had a funny pain in my right side, under my breast. I thought I’d pulled a muscle or something. (Now, I’m nurse and should have known better, but I’m also the queen of denial. I didn’t feel bad enough to be sick.) I finally broke down about 8 p.m. that night and went to the ER where I work. One quick chest Xray later, and my friend the doc said “You have pneumonia!”
“I don’t feel bad enough to have pneumonia. When you have pneumonia you can’t breathe and you cough and you feel really weak and you have a high fever. I can breathe just fine, see? And I’m not coughing. So I can’t have pneumonia. Go look at the Xray again.” I told you, I am the all time champion of denial.
So he showed me the Xray. Yep, pneumonia. Right in the spot where it hurt when I breathed. I got a shot for pain (which didn’t help a lot), a dose of IV antibiotics, some scripts for same, and off home I went. With instructions to come back if I got to feeling worse in the next couple of days. Filled my prescriptions on the way home, took a pain pill, and went to bed.
And not to sleep. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to lay on my left side, or on my back, and laying on my right side was out of the question. Some time about 4 am I realized that maybe I was a little worse off than I originally thought. I kicked hubby out of bed and said, “Take me back to the ER. I can’t take this any more. They’re going to have to admit me.”
So they did. I got another IV, and some different pain medicine, and a room in the hospital. Called hubby and my parents to let them know the room number, and tried to reassure my mom the I was okay and would be out in a day or two. “They’ll just keep me here until the pain gets better, Mom. I’ll be out by Saturday, Sunday at the latest.”
I honestly don’t remember much of the next three days. I remember they had to change my pain medicine again because it wasn’t lasting long enough. I remember the doctor saying something about “bilateral pneumonia” and I remember that they had to restart my IV every single day. I remember that at one point my O2 Sat droppped to 83%. Other than that, I pretty much lost about three days of my life. I spent a week in the hospital, and I’m winding up a week of home bedrest, and if I never get that sick again it will be way too soon. It still hurts to breathe.
And thus ends my lament about the suckiness of being sick. So, what have you guys been up to?