Summer Is Over

I have a few minutes lunch break and so I thought I would use it to say hello to family and friends via this site. On the medical front I had hoped that the dog days of summer would bring calm but I am afraid that events a week ago Friday blew that expectation high out of the water. I will describe it how I experienced it.

At midnight I flung myself over Denise's dog, Sadie, who was dutifully sleeping by my bed, into the bathroom where, hate to say, I vomited violently. When I got back into bed I descended into a state of throbbing pain on my left flank, fever, chills and a sense of disorientation that increased throughout the night. Denise was at Holy Cross Monastery, where of course quiet prevails, and so had her phone off. Finally around five I called my dear friend Susan D., a community nurse here in Ithaca, erstwhile adult age student of mine. We talked for about 10 minutes at which point she said, "Do you want me to take you to the hospital?" I said no, and she said, "Okay, well I am going to work, call me if you need me." About 15 minutes later she was in my driveway and up the stairs. "I am not going to argue with you over the phone. Get in the car."

Susan might have saved my life. Turns out I was becoming septic from a bacterial infection. A fortnight and the most potent broad spectrum antibiotics later I am almost completely recovered although still tired and drained from the experience.

What was it and why? A common strep infection gone wild, probably because the plasma cell disorder has suppressed my immune system. Unusually it did not nest in my lungs, in which case it would have been a pneumonia, but I believe emerged out of my sinuses, where it is possible that for some time I have had inflammation, infection or sinusitis. This condition goes a long way to explain the PAIN in the right side of my face. I do not have that acute pain today, nor have I had it for some days, notwithstanding the fact that I since for a few days I could keep nothing down I have in effect gone on a drug holiday. I have the completely weird sensation of the nerve disorder: numbness, sensitivity and tingling, but the pain is gone. You should have seen what came out of my nostrils last week. Okay, enough.

Lord above, can you contemplate how thick some doctors are not to have made the connection between the endoscopic approach of the surgery last fall, described by my ENT doctor as having, "banged my sinuses all to hell," and my facial pain? No wonder my doctor always looked at me a big crazy when I told him about the pain. I get it now. With the nerve disorder I should have every weird feeling in the book, which by late evening is as distracting as pain, but it is not exactly pain. The pain must have come from the pressure in the sinuses. Here is an example of how specialists cannot see the forrest for the trees. I might be dead but for the medical community, including the same doctor who insisted to the Emergency Department doctor that I be given intravenous powerful antibiotics on the day I showed up on ED's doorstep, but I do despair at the persistent experience I have of being "vindicated" (doctor's word not mine) only after having suffered many months of symptoms before a test, or in this case a severe infection, bore out the cause of the problem. And this I now know: I cannot afford to get that sick again.

This Friday I go to Boston Medical for the six month echocardiogram. I suspect it will be fine, as are my kidneys and lungs and other vital organs. But I also suspect that with my diminished immune system I am not quite be the same healthy girl I was before. A metaphor for aging, perhaps, but a reality nonetheless, one I accept with a certain degree of humility about the frailty of our human condition.