Thursday, July 22, 2010

Chapter Two: The Hospital Visit(s)

Friday morning brought no solace. The pain in my head was excruciating and the very thought of food or drink made my guts churn. I was dehydrated and by the seventh day of pain, there was no hope of redemption in sight. At that point I was pretty sure there was something seriously wrong with my head, like an aneurysm or a tumor or something (G-d forbid) and I was convinced that if I didn’t get to the hospital pronto, my head was going to explode. I calmly informed my mother that we were going to the hospital. She just looked at me and started getting her shoes on.

The emergency room was pretty empty, not surprisingly considering it was about 6:00 pm on a Friday. Too close to Shabbat for trivial matters, too early in the evening for bar fights. They admitted me right away, took some blood and gave me a bed. I napped for a few hours until it was time for a C.T. scan. They directed me to the waiting room of the C.T. lab, which was around the corner, down the hall, make a right, turn left at the pediatric section, go through the glass doors, turn right, then left, then right again and go to the end of the hall. Of course, the directions they gave us were something like, “Go around the corner and turn right.” Thank G-d my mother was with me, because in my pain-induced half delusional state, I’d probably have ended up in the parking lot. But together we found it, she reading the signs and directing us on and me moaning loudly, scaring off any would-be muggers.

We sat down to wait. The C.T. technician who finally admitted me was a middle aged Israeli man wearing jeans and a t-shirt who looked like he’d left his cab running outside and dashed in to quickly scan my brain before returning to cruise the streets outside for fares. I calmly lied down on the table while calmly ignoring his fifteen minute lecture about my nose ring and today’s youth in general. My mother led the way back to my bed and then went off to find the Shabbat meal they were hosting somewhere in the hospital. I stared forlornly at the two pieces of bread I may or may not eat and at the small container of cottage cheese I was pretty sure I didn’t want to eat. When she came back, it was lumbar puncture time. For those of you picturing a happy lumber jack whistling and dancing away, you may now banish that image from your mind. It’s nothing quite so innocent. You may if you’d like picture an insane lumber jack swinging his axe around and felling everything in his path. It’s nothing really like that either but at least now we’re in the right mindset. The doctor asked me if I could roll into a ball on my side. I told him that I thought I could probably manage a fetal position in these circumstances. I stared at my knees as he pulled out what my imagination is filling in for me was a humongous needle and plunged it into my spine, extracting whatever fluids a person has in their spinal cord. This is the point where we noticed that my mother was now sitting on the floor trying to stop it from spinning. I invited her to come share my bed but there wasn’t really enough room until they could pry my knees away from my chin. Finally they gave me some fluids with pain killers and anti-nausea meds through an IV and I went to sleep sort of happy-ish.

They woke me up around 7:00 in the morning to tell me that all my tests were fine and that I was free to go whenever I was ready. I asked the doctor what he thought it was and he said that, according to the blood tests it could be a virus. I was pretty skeptical, however I was very relieved that my brain wasn’t going to explode anytime soon. Still, it didn’t really explain ANYTHING and as soon as the drugs wore off I was going to be as bad off as before. The doctor at least gave me some prescriptions, one for pain and one for nausea. We were able to get a cab driver to take us to the closest open pharmacy (which was across the way in Sheikh Jarakh) and then home to Ma’ale Adumim.

We got home in time for the sorriest Shabbat meal ever (at least for me). I’d taken the anti-nausea pills an hour before lunch as directed but a few hours later I was forced to revisit the sorriest Shabbat meal ever, made even sorrier the second time around by the presence of my head in the toilet. Plus the Tramadex they’d given me for the headache wasn’t doing anything much except visiting the inside of the toilet bowl. By evening, the options were a.) go back to the hospital or b.) go to sleep in my own bed and see how I was feeling the next morning. I chose my bed.

The next morning I woke up early and was still feeling pretty awful. I debated waking my mother up and going to the hospital but the internal debate was pretty much decided for me when I started throwing up the remainder of my stomach contents (which were water). We called a cab and returned to the hospital. They put me in a nice dark corner which was even quiet for a few hours. They reacquainted me with Jorge (my IV) and let me sleep for a little while. Then it was off to the neurologist in a wheelchair with a hook for my IV bag. A nurse wheeled me up and left me outside in the waiting room. I ran into a bit of trouble when the doctor finally opened the door and called my name. Everyone just stared at me waiting for me to go in. Finally I said, “What, am I supposed to push myself in?” I was not really in the mood to pull the needles out of my arm by catching them in the wheels trying to roll myself into the doctor’s office. My mom finally went, “oh” and jumped up to push me in. Turns out that the neurologist was actually the same neurologist who moonlights at the Maccabi clinic in Ma’ale Adumim whom I had an appointment with that Wednesday. Anyway, he did lots of tests, looked at my C.T. scan and declared me perfectly fine.

Next they wheeled me off to an eye doctor. Turns out bad vision was not the cause of my now 9 day headache and nausea. I did get a nice tour of the hospital, getting wheeled around all over the place, but I’m not sure I had enough painkillers in me at that moment to fully appreciate it. Not much else happened the rest of the day. I let my mother go home for the night while I tried to sleep in my corner with some old woman screaming like a banshee all night. That almost wasn’t so bad but every time she screamed, the other patients would scream “shut up!” At some time around 2:00 in the morning the nurse woke me up to move me to a bed on the other side of the ER. I don’t know why; she said it would be more comfortable there and I was not awake enough to argue. She put me in a well-lit area with lots of noise and possibly the most uncomfortable bed ever. She then promptly forgot about me. I was going to ask her for some more medication but I don’t think anyone even came back to check on me until the morning (except for a curious nurse who was wondering where the heck I’d just come from). I spent most of the rest of the night fighting with my sheets which for some reason kept popping off the bed and covering my face. By the time my parents came back in the morning I was ready to go home (and I’m not at all convinced that that wasn’t the purpose of sticking me in that bed and then leaving me there). I was pretty annoyed at this point and it didn’t help that the doctor on call was insisting that my headache was a tension headache. She told me I should go to the pharmacy and buy an over-the-counter medication containing Acamol and caffeine. That’s about the equivalent of taking a Tylenol with a cup of coffee, which after the Percocet they’d given me, made me think that maybe she’d gotten her M.D. from a mail order catalog. She’d been not very subtly hinting to me that I could leave whenever I was ready but when I told her I wanted to go home she made me go up and see the neurologist again just in case the doctor and head doctor from my previous hospitalization, the neurologist and the neurologist’s boss had all missed something in the C.T. the first and second times around (this is obviously how they prevent lawsuits in Israel). After waiting outside his office for what seemed like forever, he let me in and cleared me for discharge. He told me that if I wanted, he could recommend that they hospitalize me but since I didn’t see any real point (they were already convinced it was just a totally normal 10 day headache), I declined the offer. So I went home and took a nap on the couch.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Chapter One of "The Case of the Mysterious Illness"

Case of the Mysterious Illness

I know starting a blog with an illness is certainly not an auspicious way to begin. However, many people have been worried about me and in order to dispel these concerns (although I may inadvertently create new ones on the state of modern medicine in their place), I have decided to post all the goings-on of the past few weeks. Or maybe this blog is just to dispel my own boredom and to hell with everyone else’s concerns. No offense.

It started three weeks ago on Shabbat. It was just a headache that came and went for the next few days. By Tuesday it had turned into a constant pain in my head, the kind that left me clutching my head on my desk and groaning. I even made an emergency visit to the chiropractor for fear that my unnaturally bent neck had finally gotten hold of my brain and was doing its boa constrictor impression (always a favorite at parties) on my brain. My back felt great afterward, but my head… not so much. By Wednesday, it was the kind of pain that led me to flee work early for fear of being found dead in my chair by someone wanting to borrow a stapler. I figured that if I died on the bus, at least the person whose feet I fell on would notice right away and since the route goes right next to Bikur Cholim hospital they could just drop me off on the way. By the time I got home, I had a fever of 100.9 and at least felt justified in leaving work early.

Now, mind you, I’d been taking pain relievers all week long, Ibuprofen, Advil, Aleve, whatever I could get my hands on and nothing was helping. I’d have taken rodent pee mixed with dish detergent and raven feathers plucked during the full moon if someone had told me that it would work, but luckily I don’t know anyone that mean.

By Thursday it was time to visit the doctor. My head felt like it was going to explode and I could barely move for fear of jarring my brain. The doctor did all the regular tests, blood pressure, open your mouth, stare at the ducky while I shine a bright light into your eye, etc. Everything was normal. He had no idea what could be causing a 5 day headache so he told me to come back on Sunday to do some tests and maybe by then I’d be feeling better. He wasn’t even going to give me any kind of pain reliever until I broke down and started crying on his desk. I was like,”it’s been 5 days! It’s not going to get better. It’s only getting worse!” He looked a bit concerned then and asked me if my runny nose was another symptom. I assured him it was just because I was crying, so he relented and gave me a prescription for some pain relievers. He also gave me a referral for a neurologist and for whatever reason a referral for a psychiatrist. So, my father (and always faithful companion in these situations) and I trudged up to the pharmacy, bought the meds and returned home.

This is where we run into medication problems number one and two. One- the first medication seems to have the strength of wishful thinking, and two- the second medication needs to be taken after food. Which wouldn’t have been a problem had I not thrown up my rice cake with peanut butter, handful of chips and pain reliever 15 minutes or so after it all went down. Which leads to another two problems. One- new symptom, and two- I won’t be able to eat peanut butter (one of my all time favorite foods) for at least a year. This is serious. I still can’t eat hard-boiled eggs following an unpleasant bonfire incident that occurred almost four years ago. Peanut butter makes up at least a quarter of my diet. It’s got everything a person could want (besides maybe allergens) - protein, sugar and chunky/ creamy peanut goodness depending on your personal taste.

But back to the more immediate problem. I did not have any viable sources of pain relief. This does not make me a happy (or very likable) person. So my trusty assistant called back Maccabi (the health clinic) and made an appointment with the nurse who would hopefully then let me see another doctor. Luckily the nurse was sufficiently impressed with my tale of woe, or maybe it was the moaning, and made me an appointment for a (thankfully) different doctor later that afternoon.

The new doctor did some slightly more thorough tests of her own, listened to my medication problems, and gave me a prescription for an anti-nausea medication and a prescription for a pain reliever that does not have to be taken anywhere in the vicinity of food. She also gave me a referral for an eye doctor. I’m ending up with quite a goody bag here. Get a referral for every prescription you fill - what a promotion! I’d rather get a free cinnamon bun, but that’s just me.

Well, it was time to test out the meds. After throwing up my spaghetti and tomato sauce dinner I decided that the anti-nausea medication didn’t help and I couldn’t be sure about the other stuff because it never even had a chance. My problems had now expanded. My head was killing me, nothing was staying down including the anti-nausea meds and even water was making me nauseous. I did the only thing I could- I went to bed.