Earlier this week, when I was too busy with Grad School Stuff to even contemplate a post, let alone set aside time to compose one, I was pondering this site's existence and purpose. If Grad School Stuff is going to keep me this busy, is ISleepInADrawer.com in for an early retirement? A temporary shelving? A permanent resting spot? Will it be like the old family dog?... take it out in the woods and shoot it? Will it know it's coming?
Eventually, I began to search out a compromise... sure, I'll post less... considerably less... but, perhaps I can keep it at a basal level of attention: an absolute-minimum that will both sate my need to type my thoughts out on this page and keep my handful of loyal readers satisfied. "Jim, try a short post later this week, and see how it goes," I'd tell myself. "Maybe that'll be a pragmatic middle ground... two or three short posts during the week, and one longer post during the weekend."
But, as Grad School Stuff made ever-increasing demands on my time (coupled with this annoying habit I have of seeking out 6.5-8 hours of sleep each night), the short posts I kept promising myself never materialized; and, by Friday, I was thinking that I'd have to take the Ol' Dog out into the woods and shoot it.
Fortunately for both the Ol' Dog and you, something else also happened on Friday to yield a rollercoaster of a weekend, and remind me of the reasons why ISleepInADrawer.com isn't yet ready for shelving. After all, how else can I share James-at-his-most-humble?
Around Friday, just after lunch at yet-another-reception welcoming us grad students into the program, the aforementioned thought (Ol' Dog - out in woods - shoot it - no more ISleepInADrawer.com) first entered my head.
About an hour later, I was sitting in yet-another seminar thinking, "My God, it's cold in here..."
Two hours later, I was attending Friday Night Seminar: "Jeez, it's cold in here, too!"
An hour later, I was at Beer Hour: "Weird... now it's hot in here." I ducked out early (after downing my Mac and Jack's) so no one would see me sweating profusely.
And an hour after that, as I finally got home, I was cold again - positively frigid. I took one look at Zach and said, "I think I'm getting sick."
I spent the next few hours wrapped up in nearly every blanket we own, huddled in fetal position on the bed. The chill-sweat cycles came too quickly for me to respond by adjusting my blanket coverage. By the time "God, it's freezing in here" switched to profuse sweating head-to-toe, I'd begin to shed blankets and clothes without abandon, only to discover chills returning by the time I'd sprawled myself (pitifully, naked) across the matress. Zach says it looked like a rather humorous, if not unnatural, dance (he hastened to add "in retrospect").
But, I somehow dragged myself out of bed at 10:00PM, my body awkwardly thrust into two pairs of sweatpants and two sweatshirts, and draped royally in three blankets, to watch the season finale of Battlestar Galactica. When Zach asked me why I was out of bed, I muttered an incoherent reply: "It's President Roslin... she'd do it for me."
Indeed.
Most of Friday night and Saturday is a blur to me. Zach reports that my fevers became markedly worse in intensity, initially jumping to 101°F, but getting higher and higher throughout Saturday. I became coherent enough around 10:00AM, though, to dig up my current lab rotation's "Emergency Contact" list, hoping my PI's home number would be on there, so Zach could ring her for me and let her know that I wouldn't be joining her in lab that afternoon. I blurred and slurred to him, "Here's the list... see if her number's on there..."
Zach: "Why wouldn't it be?
Me: "Emergency... contact... emergency contact list... under my name, my phone number isn't on there... but your celly is..."
Zach: "Celly?"
Me: "Just call her..."
So, Zach dialed the number under my PI's name, not at all taking note that the names listed under that number were those of my PI's parents, and the area code was NOT an area code of the Puget Sound area. So, Zach apparently called my PI's parents, and asked for Katie. The reply: "Uh... this is her father... in Oregon." Eventually, Zach obtained the proper contact numbers and let Katie know I wouldn't be coming in. But, I'm sure I'll have some explaining to do to Katie.
When I asked Zach why he dialed a non-Puget Sound area code without hesitation:
Zach: "Well, I did hesitate, Jim! I saw that the area code was wrong."
James: "No, Zach. It was right."
Zach: "No it wasn't. Not for Puget Sound."
James: "That's right. So, why'd you call the number?
Zach: "Um... I don't know."
James: "And Katie's name wasn't under that number, too."
Zach: "Yeah, but they had the same last name!"
James: "Those are her parents!"
Zach: "Yeah, and the area code was wrong!"
James: "No, it's right! Right for South/Central Oregon!"
Anyway, sometime after Zach called my PI's parents, I slipped back into the cycle of increasingly-severe fevers, and became (to quote my Mammaw) "weak as a kitten." Zach desperately tried to call my primary care physician, only to find that the office was entirely closed (but, oddly, they were open last Saturday for my pink eye episode). While I was tossing around on the bed in a delirium, he was tracking down another physician who was listed as "on call" for my primary care physician. Finally, Zach ended up on the phone with Dr. T who, upon hearing my symptoms and asking a multitude of questions, hypothesized that I was suffering from "some sort of stomach flu."
Zach: "Well, what should we do?"
Dr. T: "What's his fever up to now?"
Zach: "About a half hour ago, it was at 102.8°F."
Dr. T: "Has it been any higher than that?"
Zach: "Yeah. It hit 103.2°F an hour before that."
Dr. T: "Get him to the ER if it gets near 104°F."
Which is what it did early Saturday evening. Zach was diligent in his catalog, and made the call to visit the University of Washington Medical Center: 103.8°F... 104.5°F... 104.2°F... 104.7°F... The only parts of the ride to the ER that I remember were asking Zach to turn up the heat and asking Zach to call my PI to let her know that I wouldn't be making it into lab today.
Let's catalog this ER visit as the third in my life. I don't remember the first visit, as I was four months old at the time. But, I apparently got to spend a few days in an "oxygen tent" (think Boy-in-the-Plastic-Bubble). My second visit to the ER came about a year ago due to an "ear problem," and was cleared up (literally and figuratively) after five minutes with the attendant on duty. Thus, on walking into the ER and signing the consent-to-treatment documents, I thought to myself, "We'll spend most of our time waiting... but, five minutes with the attendant on duty, and we'll be all set to go." We found a few seats in the packed waiting room, but I was called in after about ten minutes so a nurse could take my vitals. When temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and God-knows-what-else had been counted and cataloged, she not-so-surreptitiously raised her eyebrows, exhaled quickly, and said, "You'll have to wait, but not long..."
True, enough, five minutes later, another nurse called me in. When Zach began to follow me, she stopped him, saying, "Just the sick one... we'll only be a few minutes." I was too delirious to whip out the gay-rights speech, and too relieved to hear that this visit would indeed only last about five minutes. But, instead of showing me to a room, she had me sit down in a chair next to the nurse's station. She kept asking me to look her in the eye.
Me: "Aren't I?"
Nurse: "No, your eyes keep wandering."
Me: "Oh."
Nurse: "And, you're mumbling."
Me: "Oh, I thought I was talking."
Nurse: "You're very dehydrated. And your fever's out of control."
Me: "Huh?"
Nurse: "Take this."
Me: "What is it?"
Nurse: "It's Tylenol."
Me: "Thanks."
Nurse, walking away: "Stay here. I'll be back in a minute to start you on an IV drip."
That got my attention. IV?! As in, "Intravenous?!" I spent the next five minutes convincing myself that she must have been speaking to another patient, and that I was okay. I spent the next two minutes after that thinking that, if I acted quickly, I could run over to the water cooler down the hall and drink enough water so that penetrating a wall of a vein in my elbow joint would no longer be necessary.
At this point, it should be obvious that I have Issues with blood. And I have issues with needles when they relate to blood. Gonna give me a flu shot? Fine. I'll willingly roll up my sleeve, so long as I get a cool Batman band-aid and a pat on the head afterward. But, I'm the guy who cut his finger at a friend's house at the age of ten and promptly passed out. I'm the guy who threw up at the doctor's office in college right after getting a finger-prick blood test. I'm the guy who nearly passed out two years ago at his physician's office for a blood test.
And here I am, in the ER: confused, dehydrated, delirious, freezing, prickly, and now watching the nurse approach with the IV needle. Apparently, I went pale "right then and there." She spent the next few minutes, hand on my shoulder, saying firmly-yet-maternally, "Calm down and breathe. We're going to make you better." Zach was called in somewhere along the line to hold my hand and keep me distracted during the grisly deed. I have only scattered, confused memories of the nurse putting the IV in. My first solid memories come a few minutes afterwards: me sweating profusely and feeling quite weak, the nurse noting that I don't look green anymore, Zach dabbing my forehead with a washcloth, and me asking, "What happened?"
Nurse: "You passed out."
Me: "No I didn't!"
Nurse: "You went green as soon as I put the needle in."
Me: "Huh?"
Zach: "Yeah, Jim. You did."
Me: "But I kept my head up the whole time."
Nurse: "That's because your friend held it up for you."
Zach: "Yeah... you went entirely dead weight."
I should stop at this point and say that Zach and I sometimes play a game called Dead Weight. Well, it's not really a game. It's more of a torture exercise. It usually plays itself out as: Zach's lying in bed reading, and I crawl over him, move his book, grin gleefully and yell, "Dead weight!!!", and then collapse on him, relaxing every muscle and simulating the perfect corpse. Zach, after he's done yelling "Ooooof!" as the force of my-body-hitting-his shunts all air from his lungs, is then charged with the task of moving my Dead Weight off of his body, so we can both go on with our lives. Zach has never been very successful with this aspect of the game, and spends most of the time whining, "But Jim, I was in the middle of a good part!" He's tried the reverse for me, too, where I'm reading and he pounces on me, screaming "Dead Weight!" moments before his body hits mine. But, in those cases, I usually tickle him immediately to end the game.
Apparently, Zach won this round of Dead Weight. He managed to hold me upright in the chair for the minute or so I was "out cold," letting the nurse put the IV in. She also wisely took out a substantial blood sample while I was passed out to check my blood cell count. I regained consciousness soon after, and found myself to be the short term laughing stock of the University of Washington Medical Center Emergency Ward. Zach and I spent the next fifteen minutes or so talking to nurses, as he lovingly dabbed my head with cold water. The IV hooked me up to a low saline solution, apparently to rehydrate me. The Tylenol helped keep a few of the fever chill/sweat cycles at bay. Eventually, my room became available and we were ushered in. As if I hadn't already been the laughing stock of the ER, they also gave me a gown to change into. Zach had to help me tie it.
Dr. M came in first to conduct a thorough examination. She ordered more blood cultures (which were, luckily, done through the hole in my circulatory system the IV had already made) and a urine sample (Me: "I'm dehydrated!" Her: "Try?"). She also hinted at a possible chest X-ray and TB test "just to cover all of the bases." The severity of the moment was broken by the body-wide examination for rashes, bruises, and other signs of what's-going-on. Back, legs, chest, arms... and finally "down there." I resisted the urge to laugh when Dr. M asked if I'd like Zach to leave the room. It was a thorough fondling, but in the end Dr. M fixated on my blood cell count (apparently, my white blood cells were at a level of "16... and we consider 'high' to be 10!"). I forced out a urine specimen (Zach did leave the room for that one), and I was surprsingly examined by two other doctors on duty: Dr. S and Dr. R. As it turns out, Dr. M was doing her ER residency, Dr. S was the residency suprvisor, and Dr. R was Dr. S's supervisor and the senior doc-on-duty. By the time Dr. R came in, I was having another delirious fever/chill episode, but the tone of Zach's voice in his questions, "Do all patients get this kind of treatment? Three doctors, all the tests?" spoke volumes. Dr. R reassured us that she was covering all the "reasonable" bases. Dr. M, minutes later, tried to provide the same reassurance.
All three, however, expressed profound frustration with my tongue. "Stick your tongue out... no, all the way!" "Doc, that's as far out as it goes; it's attached to all the way to the front!" Out come the tongue depressors!
I'm pretty sure that, at a young and impressionable age, someone jokingly told me that doctors reserved tongue depressors for their "problem patients." Since, at every doctor's visit I've ever had, the tongue depressor has been used to gag me so the doc can get a good look at my throat, I've seen myself as a "problem patient" my whole life. The realization late in high school that 99.9% of Homo sapiens can stick their tongues out farther than me did little to alleviate this complex. The seeds had been sown at a particularly ripe age for naïvety: they're here to stay. Unless someone wants to start a fund drive for surgery so I can have the tiny flap of tissue affixing my tongue to the bottom of my jaw clipped. I'm sure Zach would gladly donate to that fund.
One IV, three blood tests, one urine sample, and one rapid strep test later, their diagnosis seemed too elementary: strep throat. This is, of course, after the rapid strep test came back negative. But, as Dr. M said, "We get a lot of false negatives." Zach ran down to the 24-hour pharmacy to fill my penicillin prescription while I polished off the last of my rehydrating IV. Dr. M and a nurse recommended keeping the fever in check with Motrin IB, and gave me a few samples to start off with. The only other grisly task that remained was removing the IV. But, I was in such pain as the nurse removed the tape holding the IV cord to my arm (read: James has hairy arms) that I barely noticed the removal of the actual needle. Discharge papers signed and penicillin/Motrin IB in hand, Zach led me, weakly and arm-in-arm, to the car, and then back home. He gave me free reign of the bed last night, taking the futon in the next room. The fever cycles are kept entirely in check by Motrin IB, showing that I'm entirely at the mercy of whatever's-ravaging-me. But, since classes begin Wednesday, it should be interesting to see what other beginning-of-grad-school surprises pop up between now and then.
Stay tuned. Perhaps I'll post about them.
Posted by James at September 25, 2005 12:33 PM