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Posted by bienchat@hotmail.com on July 12, 2006, 2:03 am
OMG Kim! What a nightmare you've been through. Heres a giant
cyber ((((HUG)))) and an even gianter prayer that you're feeling better
and back to normal soon!
Marie and the cats
The Other Kim wrote:
> Well, I just got out of the hospital. On Wednesday, after I made that
> post about spiking a fever very early in the morning, I spiked a fever
> again, about 2 hours before my regularly scheduled doctor's appointment.
> I took Tylenol and crawled under the covers until the shakes stopped,
> then got ready to go. I had my son drive me to the doc's. Good thing,
> because he sent me to the emergency room - the same one from early in
> the morning - for a CT scan - normal, with bone and brain intact - and
> drainage and to start treatment. My WBC count was 42, with normal
> being 4 to 11, so they knew this was an infection. The ER doc drained
> this thing, and it produced about 30 cc of pus; this was no cyst but a
> raging abscess. I was admitted that night. IV antibiotics every 6
> hours round the clock. They did blood cultures in addition to culturing
> the stuff that drained. The blood cultures stayed negative, so the
> infection had stayed localized. Took them a few days to identify just
> what kind of bacteria we were dealing with, and then it turns out to be
> a strep that's normally found in one's mouth and is harmless there.
> It's also a cause of bacterial endocarditis, so an echocardiogram was
> ordered and was normal; they did find a heart, though <g>
>
> Yesterday the infectious disease specialist called in a hematologist to
> check my blood work and see if he may be missing something since my WBC
> count was still elevated at 18 (but it was still decreased from the
> previous day and had been decreasing since I was admitted). The
> hematologist saw me afterwards and said that everything looked normal
> and I'm probably just having a slow response to the antibiotics. I
> start to think I'm gonna go home soon.
>
> Today around 1 PM a technician comes into my room and says that one of
> my docs has ordered a test that was gonna take a few hours. At that
> point I just melt down completely. No doc had been in to see me yet,
> and no one had mentioned anything about any test to me yesterday (this
> was to be an iridium scan, where they take blood out, label the WBCs
> with iridium, then reinfuse the blood and see where the WBCs migrate, to
> check for other sites of infection or other pathology), and I just
> wanted to go home because my 2 or 3 night stay had turned into 6, and I
> needed to get back to work 'cause I'm self-employed and my clients are
> understanding but not *that* understanding. The nurse called both my
> admitting doc and Dr. Perez to say that I was quite upset about this
> since it was a surprise. Dr. Perez got to my room a short while later
> and apologized profusely. Apparently he had written the order before
> the hematologist had seen me, and after speaking with the hematologist
> he decided the test wasn't necessary but neglected to cancel the order;
> he also forgot to mention it to me yesterday, for which he also
> apologized. My admitting doc got to the room and the docs agreed that
> there really was no reason to keep me in the hospital, so they let me go
> home.
>
> I'm not completely done with this thing yet. I'm on antibiotics for
> another 2 weeks, at least, and a visiting nurse is supposed to come over
> every day starting tomorrow to do daily dressing changes; I can't
> exactly do this myself 'cause it's on the back of my head. I go back to
> my doc on Friday for follow-up blood work, and if this doesn't get
> better or flares up I'll deal with it then.
>
> I'm just happy to be home :-)
>
> The Other Kim
> kimagreenfieldatyahoodotcom
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