The Hole Within

CHAPTER 61

Several weeks of treatment went by and I begin to feel especially bad. It was my day off chemo and I had the car so I could go see my infectious disease doctor. By the time I drove to pick Mel up from work I was feeling very sick. I was nauseous and my head pounded in pain. My body hurt all over in spite of the Soma and I was chilled despite the one hundred-ten-degree temperature. Mel could see that I was sick and she asked me if I knew why. Before I could answer I had her pull over to the side of the road and I vomited violently. I told her that I thought I must be anemic, as I usually was with the chemo. I must have looked worse than normal because she said that we were going to the emergency room. 

When we got there, I could barely stand so Mel fetched a wheelchair to push me in. We waited a lifetime to be seen and I tried to doze, my head laying on Mel's shoulder. The emergency room doctor finally saw me, took my blood and said he would be back. An hour later he returned to tell me that my blood work was fine, I was not anemic. That I must have the flu. I was released and I waited on the hospital bed while Mel went to get the car. An astute nurse waited with me. She took my blood pressure while I sat and then asked me to stand. She took it while I stood swaying and in immediately told me to sit back down. She repeated the process as Mel came in to retrieve me. The nurse told me to lie down, that I was not going anywhere. My blood pressure was dangerously low. They attached a cuff to my arm and took my blood pressure about every three minutes, the machine's alarm sounding. There was suddenly a flurry of activity around me. They hooked me up to a bag of saline and manually took my blood pressure every thirty seconds or so. I had no idea what was going on. I was feeling sicker and sicker. My head hurt so badly I was crying. The nurses moved me into a private room, helped me onto the bed and proceeded to invert it so that my feet were in the air and my head was at the lowest point. This served to increase the pain in my head. At some point, I asked what was happening, why I had to lie like this. The nurse told me that they could not get a blood pressure on me. It all became a blur of nurses coming in to take my blood pressure, take blood and check on me. Mel had left to go home to get some sleep.

Sometime in the night I was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. I woke freezing and found I had no blanket. There were ice packs under each arm pit and between my legs. I called for the nurse and desperately begged her for a blanket, my teeth chattering. She explained that my temperature was dangerously high and that they had to cool me down. I cried and pleaded as she changed out the melted packs for fresh ones full of ice. I was so cold it was painful. I drifted in and out of consciousness the next few days in the Intensive Care Unit. I remembered waking to see mom and Mel at my bedside and telling them I hurt. The pain in my head was intense, like nothing I had felt before. I eventually woke enough to discover that the bags of medication on the IV stand were going into an IV in my neck. "The central line was removed," Mel explained. "It was full of infection, you became septic." Sepsis is an extremely dangerous infection in the bloodstream. Depending on the organism which caused the infection it can be extraordinary hard to treat. The young, the old and the sick often subcome and die. Alternatively, the infection can settle in an organ or a limb and cause the part to die and have to be removed.

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I was more than miserable lying in the ICU. Nurses came in to change IV bags and slide a bedpan under me. I would lie and try to pee, and ended up with only a teaspoon of urine in the pan despite all the IV fluids I was getting. They were concerned that my kidneys were shutting down so they inserted a urinary catheter. Slowly my kidneys started to produce urine as antibiotics fought the raging infection in my blood. After a time, two? Three? Four? days, I became stabilized and was moved to a medical floor to finish my antibiotics. The male nurse that came in to assess told me that I was very lucky girl to have survived. I had an antibiotic resistant strain of Staph infection and the doctors only gave me a ten percent chance to live. I was on four of the strongest antibiotics they could give me . He told me that I was on enough antibiotics to treat all the people in Phoenix. Mel and I listened in horror. Neither of us had any idea it had been that bad. When Mel told my mom, she was livid that they never told her how serious it was. If she had known, she would never have left my bedside. We were humbled at how close to death I had been. If that nurse in the emergency room had not thought to check my blood pressure I would have gone home, the fever spiking, and by the time I would have been treated, it would have most likely have been too late. I wished I knew who that nurse was so that I could thank her for saving my life. To this day, I say a prayer of thanks to her.

Before I left the hospital, they inserted a new central line, again, switching sides. I went back home, no worse for wear and started the treatment routine again. Have a nearly lost me, Mel was better this time around. She was more sensitive to how I was feeling, though she still resented the illness. Months passed by and my body was ravaged by the chemo. I no longer had the comfort of the Soma. While I was in the hospital they found that I was at a toxic level of the drug. Dr. Middleton lost his hospital rights due to careless prescribing and I lost my escape. Once again, the time came when I was done with treatment. Once again, the cavity had gotten smaller. This time I was cautious about becoming optimistic. I had my hopes crushed too many times.

This doesn't make sense.