I haven’t blogged in almost two months, partly because I’ve been moving, but mostly because I almost died. I’ll fill you in on the ghastly details.
Just before Memorial Day weekend, I woke up in the middle of the night, freezing cold and shivering uncontrollably. This was in late May in central Florida, in a house that was assembled from a Sears catalog in the 1920s and scarcely renovated since then; the roof is made of tin, the insulation is nonexistent, the electrics were installed back when electricity was popularly viewed as a passing fad, and the three window unit air conditioners saw their heyday about the same time as Peter Frampton and Spiro T. Agnew. "Cold" is not something I should reasonably have been feeling at this time.
Eventually, my cold spell passed, and by the next day I was feeling more like the guest of honor at a Maori barbecue. I took my temperature and found that I now had a 103-degree fever. Some Tylenol brought the fever down some, but eventually it came back, and over the next couple of days I alternated between high fever and almost-normal body temperature. To make matters worse, I was overcome by nausea, such that any food I tried to eat, no matter how bland, prompted violent vomiting. At this point I still thought all I had was just a particularly bad case of the flu.
The fact that I hadn’t gotten any better after three days led me to try going to the local walk-in clinic to see if there was some wonder drug they could give me that would help bring down the fever and alleviate my nausea. Imagine my dismay when I found that the clinic was closed for Memorial Day weekend. Becky suggested taking me to the emergency room, but I didn’t think the flu, even an especially worrisome case of it, was worth bothering the emergency room staff over. (I’ve since learned that people bring trivial cases to the emergency room all the time, and that they don’t really mind; if it’s not something they need to deal with, they’ll send you somewhere else, so it’s better to err on the side of emergency.)
On Tuesday the clinic finally opened back up, and Becky drove me down there. My account of what happens over the next couple of days is based mostly on what she and other people have told me, because by this time my fever was dangerously high and, unbeknownst to me, there was bleeding in my brain, so I had absolutely no clue what was going on. Becky tells me that when the clinic doctor examined me, my vital signs were so irregular and I was acting so crazy his first question was, "What kind of drugs is he on?" Somehow it was established that I wasn’t a garden-variety crackhead and that I was actually seriously ill, and so I was herded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. In one of life’s amusing little coincidences, this was the same hospital in which, thirty-two years previously, I had been born.
Once I was admitted, a flurry of tests were performed to find out just what malaise was afflicting me. At first I was kept under quarantine, in case I was harboring some exotic communicable disease. One early theory that fortunately didn’t pan out was that I was suffering from spinal meningitis. It was also theorized that I was suffering from some sort of tick-born illness, such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. (I favored this theory because I like saying the name.) Yet another doctor in the revolving cast of characters who examined me was sure I had a staph infection (or a strep infection — I’ll swear he used the two terms interchangeably). To this day I have never gotten a straight answer as to what made me so sick to begin with. But one thing is certain: by the time I was admitted to the emergency room, I had an advanced case of sepsis, and various bodily organs had begun shutting down. The bleeding in my brain was causing all sorts of interesting hallucinations, including a memorable one where I was trapped in a room full of midgets. (Mercifully, none of them talked backwards or asked me to wear oven mitts.) My liver and kidneys also weren’t functioning properly, and I had random aches and pains all over my body, including a severe pain in my left arm, which I now found I couldn’t move more than a few inches. In other words, I made it to the hospital just in time.
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