Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Whoops! I only just now noticed that I never got around to posting the entry from a week ago that I had so carefully composed in my head! I guess I'd better fill y'all in. I tweeted snippets, but then was too exhausted to blog.

The subject header stretches things a little, in that although I did have to go to two emergency rooms, the first was the ER-with-no-hospital-attached in Bowie. So technically not two hospitals, just two ERs ...

Last week, Mom got worried that I kept looking and acting sick, even with central heat and mom-cooked meals, and insisted on taking me to the ER. That was a long day, and once again I showed up with symptoms that had doctors thinking, "Oh crap, this could be bad, we'd better get brain pictures." (And once again they didn't find anything, suggesting that like other [Marklanders | SCAdians | folk musicians | pick something that amuses you], I have no brain. Or that I keep it somewhere less vulnerable.)

First ER: I arrived walking but feeling really, really, really tired. Mom dropped me off and went shopping (after getting a ballpark estimate from the check-in desk as to how long it would probably take). I started editing an arrangement of a tune I was working on, and waited for my name to be called. When I got to a bed and was seen by a doctor, the doctor said she didn't like the fact that so many of my symptoms lacked bilateral symmetry ... got nurses to draw blood, get an EKG, get blood pressure lying, sitting, and standing, and give me a nebulizer (albuterol, AFAICT) treatment, then went and found the cardiologist.

I hate the nebulizer. When I use my albuterol inhaler normally, I don't notice any side effects. When I put my inhaler in a plastic bag so that I could rebreathe any of the drug that I coughed out before it could help me when I was in the worst part of The Flu Experience, I noticed a little shakiness, a little speediness, but it was just a "good thing I'm already in bed" deal. But the nebulizer ... *sigh* I'm pretty sure it's the same drug, just a much larger dose, and it feels like terror, like panic. That is, my brain -- okay, my mind -- knows damned well that where I am is safe, that the drug is going to make me feel better later, not kill me, etc. -- but my body is telling my brain, "SCARED! SCARED! what are we scared of, boss? SCARED! SCARED!" Because the physiological reactions to the drug, at least in me, feel just like physiological reactions to absolute terrror.

But I do like being able to take deeper breaths after the trembling and the racing pulse abate.

I spent a lot of time alone, just waiting for a nurse or the doctor to check in again with the next test or questions, and I noticed that the pulse oximeter they hooked me up to, which beeped for almost every heartbeat, sometimes changed pitch. Watching it, I discovered that as my O₂ saturation level dropped, so did the pitch. And of course, given something that can be made to produce different pitches, from then on I preceived it as a potential musical instrument, and wondered how long it would take me to learn enough control to play "Jingle Bells" on it, or "Silent Night".

I resisted the urge. But the fact that I was feeling crashy may have added to my ability to resist. (I did find the volume control, which seemed rather important at the timce, since my ears started acting up -- hyperacusis -- as I started feeling worse.)

(I don't remember whether the other pulse oximeters I've been hooked to in the past did the variable pitch thing. Generally, I see one unchanging number when one is attached, either 90% or 100%, depending on whether I'm having difficulty breathing at the time. During last week's ER visit, the number was fluctuating a lot, between 78% and 100%, which struck me as a sign that something was Not Usual. It also skipped a pulse every so often, making me wonder whether there was a problem with my heartbeat, but I managed to track that to a fault in one of the cables. (Specifically, the lead from the oximeter fingertip sensor was plugged into an extension cable that was then plugged into the monitor, and the extension cable was where the fault was.))

Cardiologist showed up, asked a few questions, and left. Mom showed up and was allowed in to sit with me. Main doctor showed up again, explained that she wanted a CT scan but they didn't have a CT machine, so she was sending me to another ER, offering a choice of PG or Laurel. Now at this point I thought she meant phoning ahead to say I was coming, and giving Mom directions, but she went on to explain that because of the symptoms that had her wanting a CT, I had to go by ambulance in case Something Very Bad happened en route. We figured out that I'd be getting home sometime well after dark, and Mom isn't comfortable driving at night, so Mom went home and said she'd call my middle brother to pick me up from Laurel. I settled in to wait ...

And I started feeling really crashy, and like I was freezing. An orderly or a nurse (I was pretty out of it by then, and am not sure who it was) brought me a thin sheet, which helped surprisingly well -- between that, and my body temperature being 99.4 °F when I arrived and 97.4 °F later on, I'm pretty sure it was my body having trouble with its own temperature, rather than the room actually getting colder.

A long time later, an ambulance crew arrived, strapped me to a gurney, piled my belongings around me, and wheeled me out into the night. I gradually started to wake up a bit and feel (and probably sound) more coherent during the ride to Laurel -- "Tek" ("Tech"?), the guy who rode in the back with me, wanted my opinion on various famous jazz and rock drummers. I told him about Evelyn Glennie, but was unable to remember her name at the time. By the time we reached Laurel I was pretty much awake and my speech no longer sounded drunk to me, though I still felt crappy.

The doctor who saw me at Laurel repeated a bunch of the things the doctor at Bowie had done, mostly the "follow my finger" stuff, strength tests, and asking lots of pertinent questions about my symptoms. I don't know whether he added the chest X-ray to the list, or if the first doctor had asked for that. The CT tech wheeled me off to radiology, answered a bunch of my questions, seemed pleased to get a chance to rattle off some of the features and specification of the machine (I didn't know it took multiple slices in parallel -- the carriage moved eight times, but that was either 32 or 64 slices, and he said it could be set to do even more per pass depending on what they were looking for). Then the conventional-X-ray tech found me in the CT room and wheeled me around the corner, and was similarly willing to chat about the hardware when prompted.

Eventually, the doctor came back from talking to the radiologist. He explained that the reason I'd been so very tired all the time was that a new life was growing inside my body!

Okay, he didn't phrase it quite like that; that's just my spin that amuses me. What he said was that (in addition to not finding anything on the brain CT), the head-on chest X-ray looked clear, but the side view showed an indistinct shadow in one lung that could possibly be pneumonia, and pneumonia fit enough of my symptoms (well, at least the ones that migraine/fibromyalgia didn't) that pneumonia was what he thought it was, and he was going to give me poison to kill the new life growing inside of me and making it hard for me to breathe ... er, that is, he was prescribing an antibiotic. (Well come on, it is a poison, one intended to make my body toxic to the bacteria trying to kill me *cough* using me as a host and doing me great harm by accident. It's not going to poison me, but that's still how it works, isn't it?).

I called Mom and told her to call my brother, since I expected to be nearly finished with my double-ER adventure. Some time after that, someone showed up with a cup of water, some Zithromax, and my discharge paperwork. I asked, "Is this a one-shot, or are you sending me home with a prescription to fill?"

"I've got a prescription for you. Now, about this medecine ..."

I jumped in, "Keep taking it until it's gone even if I feel better, because I don't want to breed super-bugs, right?"

"No," he started, then what I had said registered and he grinned and said, "Yeah, you got it."

Then my brother showed up and drove me back to Mom's house; Mom picked up the prescription the next day (five pills, generic, at about six bucks apiece), and I spent the next three and a half days so out of it that I kept forgetting to type and post this -- or rather, forgetting that I had not already done so -- and was breathing noticeably better by the last day of the antibiotic, though I'm still coughing some (feels more like allergy/athsma tickle than anything else -- at least I really hope the pneumonia is all gone!) and the muscles over my ribs are sore enough that even a little cough hurts. I've got more energy, though I'm still weak ... and a migraine hit the day after the last antibiotic pill.

Between the emergency rooms and the ambulance, five people commented on the PowerBook that I was working on when I was awake and not interacting with someone else. (It's a hand-me-down from a bandmate who upgraded, and I love having this tool at my fingertips.) Four said, "Hey, that's a Really Nice Machine -- I've been thinking about getting one," and one said, "I've heard those are good -- do you like it?"

Okay, now I can go back to editing the journal entry I started before I realized I'd never gotten around to writing this one.