Well, last night I went into the ER, again. The stress from work plays merry hell with my immune system and I keep getting odd cellulitis issues… This time it’s my right ear.
So they check me in, put me in a little room, on what amounts to a fancy recliner, and start a gram of Vencomyacin via IV (200ml over 1 hour) – about ten minutes into it I started to have a reaction to the medication, got up, and flagged down a receptionist… No call light in the room there at the Aurora hospital for some weird reason.
By the time they found someone who was able to turn off the infusion pump I was blacking out…
The brain, once again, is an amazing thing: I can tell you exactly what happened, even though my blood pressure had dropped below 70, I was ‘taching’ heart-wise, had lost all contact with everything outside of my core, was siezing (my hands were stuck in a full spread, actually arched back, for several minutes and are still sore), and my throat closed up making breathing a real chore…
Within seconds that little room had about half a dozen people in it; they pulled a ton of warmed blankets out of a big blue heater thing (said 140 degrees on the readout) and put them on me, I heard one doctor call for 50mg of diphenhydramine directly into the IV, which a nurse promptly did. Another doctor was leaning over me telling me that the shot to stop the reaction was ‘going to really mess me up’ while another nurse was holding a mask thing to my face – I think it was oxygen, but it was the typical squeezy respiration thing you see in the movies.
For me, I just dropped into a dissociative state as my body was basically disconnected from my brain. Everything in my field of view had a blue tinge and it appeared to me that I was viewing the world through a tube.
For the rest of the trip I just concentrated on controlling my breathing and heart rate – I’m fairly good at controlling myself and I didn’t want any of my mental “freakout” to impair anything the doctors were doing, so I just stayed tranced out with slow deep breaths and my eyes closed, only speaking to answer questions.
The shot they gave me worked pretty quick, I’d say it took about 3-5 minutes to take full effect and get me breathing on my own again. It took about 15 minutes to get feeling back in my hands and feet and I apparently sweated out about a gallon as I was terribly parched yet completely soaked… They had to peel me off the recliner thing to get me onto a gurney.
They promptly rolled me off to a real room where they EKG’d me and put me on fluids. I got the shakes pretty bad as the meds wore off – felt like I was freezing to death for about 20 minutes and had a hard time talking through my chattering – so out came another pile of warmed blankets.
A couple hours later and I was mostly okay, if a bit woozy, and they sent me home. I’m on oral antibiotics again, of which one makes me light sensitive and the other makes me a vegetarian – So I’m essentially the world’s only vegetarian vampire for the next two weeks.
Whee!
So, yeah, the getting better keeps getting worse. It’s enough to make ya feel old or something.
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