What Happened?

As I re-enter my life, returning – ever so slowly – to the many varied and vibrant activities that have become part of my quotidian existence these last couple of years, I have had to repeat this story several times. While I do not mind being the recipient of the concerned, squished face looks as I weave my death-defying tale – I do think the retelling has become rather bland, rather ‘yesterday’ – I mean, come on, yeah so I almost died…twice… but really, do I have to tell the tale yet again?

To alleviate this burden, and to inform those of you who might be far away, I decided to craft this brief explanation of where I have been this last month. Of course, the attorney in me insists that I begin said tale with a disclosure: I am not a doctor, and – baring Mrs. Abbott’s 11^th Grade Human Anatomy and Physiology Class – know next to nothing about the inner workings of my body and the finer points of organic chemistry. Therefore, please excuse any medical errors I make in the mechanics of this tale. My medical school was Wikipedia and my medical internship these last few weeks was severely clouded by many milligrams of dilaudid (which, by the way, is AWESOME).

Saturday, July 16^th, just about 5 weeks ago (at the time of this writing). Most of the day went all right. However, at around 4 o’clock, I begin to have the feeling that I am coming down with the flu. I had the classic symptoms (as I understand them). My skin was really sensitive and I felt warm (in my experience, those always go together to indicate that I have a fever). My lower back, knees and finger joints all ached. This is how I experience “body aches”. I wasn’t too concerned. Friday, one of my coworkers went home sick and I have a kid in preschool. I figure any bug that has a fighting chance will make its rounds through our house. It was the weekend so I figured, hey, 24 hours and it’ll clear up and I will be ready for work on Monday.

Well, Sunday rolls around and I am much worse for the wear. The slight flu symptoms have gotten worse (although, no coughing nor nausea) and I have a pain that is rather abnormal. At the crest of my right thigh, right where it meets the torso, it aches…pretty badly. While I am lying down it aches, when I walk it aches. Moving my legs around doesn’t trigger nor relieve the aching. The precise SPOT of the ache is very sensitive to pressure – although the surrounding area is not at all. There is no discoloration – but – well – to me, that was weird, to Amber that was weird. It was weird enough to merit a visit to our local Urgent Care.

The Urgent Care Doc – well – he does what any normal doc would do – look at my symptoms, discard the one that is a total anomaly and has no real presentation other than “Ouch” and make a diagnosis that fits the remaining symptoms. Intestinal flu. Drink fluids. Get rest. Pay your co-pay and let your home care specialist (in my case, darling Amber) take care of you. Now, I have no problem with this diagnosis. I saw that episode of Scrubs where Dr. Cox explains what a zebra is. (When you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras) So I smile, nod, and slink on back to my bedroom.

That night – around midnight to 2 A.M. – I wake up to take another dose of advil (keeps the fever down and helps me sleep). At this point I take a casual look down my leg and see… nothing, notta, it’s a totally normal right leg, complete with spindly hair and boney ankles.

I wake up at 7 A.M. thinking, gee, I had better draft that email to my boss telling him that I have an intestinal flu and will be out of the office today – and I notice – holy moly – my right leg HURTS! I take a glance at it and see that I have an ANGRY red blotch that I couldn’t cover with my right hand. I turn over and say to my wife “Ahh… darling… I think we need to take a trip back to the Urgent Care, my leg hurts.”

We pack up the kids and off we go. Luckily for us (maybe?) the same Urgent Care Doc was working so he could see me again. After looking me over for a minute or two he declares my prior symptoms NOT to be an intestinal flu. Instead it looks like I have an infection in my leg.

Now, those of you who grew up on the Living Scriptures VHS tapes I am sure remember the scene out of the Joseph Smith Story where young Joseph holds his dad while a 1820s meat cleaver – er, I mean surgeon – slices part of his leg off… without anesthetic. (Those of you who have no idea what I am talking about… er… don’t worry about it.) This scene was blitzing through my head with the phrase “Not without some damn good pain medication” playing on the PA speakers above it.

Anyway – the Doc gave me a shot in my bum – antibiotics, and a prescription for more to be filled immediately. AND… he sent me on my merry way.

Let me reiterate that I went from NO sign of an infection to 25 square inches of angry red, painfulness in a little more than 5 hours.

So, I head home. Butt sore from the shot, tired, limping on my gimp leg and feeling guilty about being a burden to my darling wife who is at home on maternity leave and has only recently begun to feel like she is slightly climbing out of the post-birth war-chamber that is the first few months of a newborns life.

At this stage, I have to reconstruct events from what my wife and others have told me. The antibiotic shot and pills have little to no effect on the infection. It keeps getting worse and I start having problems with blood pressure and keeping conscious. At around 5 P.M., Amber decides that it is time to roll out the big guns and drives me to the emergency room. Keep in mind – Henry is 3 and home, and Maxwell is 2 months, a little grouchy from fighting Thrush and – oh yeah – doesn’t really have an immune system himself.

At the emergency room, the nurse hands me (?!?) the check-in paperwork and starts taking my vitals. I scrawl chicken scratch across the different lines hoping I am not putting my phone number in the social security line and my birth date in my phone number line. Turns out, they couldn’t read most of it. During this whole time, I am basically incoherent. I get tossed on a bed, a Doctor comes in, tells me his name and something something something. Then another Doctor comes in. Then ANOTHER. I got the feeling that either the Emergency Room at El Camino Hospital wasn’t very busy that night OR there was something REALLY interesting about my leg. As a side note – having an interesting medical condition could be really cool for some… however, as a patient, you never want to be medically interesting. Interesting medical cases die. You want to be as bland as cottage cheese. Broken bone – fine. Hernia, okay. Hell, I would even take a tape worm infection over having an ‘interesting’ condition in an emergency room.

For example, I can remember at at one point a doc said: “I wanna make sure it isn’t NecFash, so we are going for a CT scan.” Now that stuck in the ol’ noggin (which by this point had several ccs of morphine in it) because I remembered an old episode of (of course) Scrubs where the diagnosis was Necrotising Faciitis – which, by the by, is known in the common tongue as FLESH EATING BACTERIA!!! So, yeah – ‘interesting condition’ = not a good thing to have.

Well, I didn’t have Necrotising Faciitis. I ended up having a simple cellulitis infection. I say “simple” because it really isn’t that exotic. Let me warn you here – do not – do NOT go googling “Celluitis” and look at pictures. First, it isn’t pretty. And second – I slapped in some mild photos taken three days after I was checked into the hospital to give you some idea of what it looked like.

Now remember, this is after THREE days of IV antibiotics. The sharpie marks show how far the infection has progressed. As you can see, while it was predominately on my lower leg, it started creeping up my thigh before we got it turned around.

But, let me get back to the emergency room. Here my experience enters the more speculative stage because (a) it depends on a lot of medical gibberish I don’t have the lobes for and (b) morphine. Evidently, when someone has a severe infection a common complication is something called sepsis. All sorts of things go wrong at this point. Blood pressure falls quite low. Kidneys stop working properly. Blood gasses are all wonky and the white blood cell count goes through the roof. Sepsis is a life threatening condition. I don’t know how accurate this is but, apparently, depending on the severity, if a patient becomes septic there is a 30 to 60% chance that he will die.

And I was septic.

Fortunately, Amber had stayed home that day taking care of me and – when things got bad – she rushed me to the hospital. The care I got in the emergency room turned me around. However, if – for example – Amber had gone to Gilroy Gardens (a kiddie amusement park 45 minutes away) with Henry like she had PLANNED and had gotten me to the emergency room an hour or two later – I would have been much, much worse (remember how fast the initial infection spread?). In my eyes, Amber’s choice to remain home saved my life that day. Thanks sweetheart.

So… sepsis worry averted, I was turfed to the recovery ward. There I received excellent care (Thank you 3C nurses!), had tubes poked inside my arms delivering a wide array of antibiotics, the occasional pain medication to help me sleep (Hello Dilaudid!) and got well acquainted with day-time television (which, by the way, sucks). My hospital stay lasted until July 22^nd. By the time I checked out, I had been in the hospital for 4 days and really, REALLY didn’t want to be coming back anytime soon.

Fate, it seems, is not without a cruel sense of humor.

This has been a LONG LONG post. I am tired of writing and I am sure you are tired of reading. In a day or two I will post again with the second, more dire and dramatic medical adventure. Thanks for reading and see you again soon.