So ten years ago today my wife took me to the doctor. I had been lying on the sofa for a week
feeling miserable and thinking that in had a cold. In my defense I had a 105 fever so I really didn’t
know what was going on.
After my wife dragged me, literally, to the doctor things
went pretty quickly. I must have looked
and been worse off than I felt. I vaguely
remember being hooked up to a machine to check my blood oxygen levels. I didn’t know what it meant that the reading
was 87 but I could tell by the reaction that it wasn’t good. I sat there and tried to will the nmber
higher. Really, I did. I was delusional –
remember the 105 fever?
So the doctor called 911 and I was taken to the ER by
ambulance. I don’t remember much of that
either. By the time I was in the ER I didn’t
even know where I was. At one point I asked
my wife to get me batteries for the hand held fan I had been using to try to
keep cool. I thought I was on the sofa
and she only had to go to the next room.
She actually had to go out to a store, which she did.
My wife is wonderful.
I don’t remember having trouble breathing but I did. I have a partial memory of the doctors in the
ER trying a CPAP machine on me. That was
like trying to breathe with my head hanging out of the window of a car doing
about 100 mph. It did not work.
So they told me that I had pneumonia and that they were
going to have to intubate me and it would be for three or four days. I asked them to put me under first and that’s
the last conscious memory I have until I woke up and my wife told me it had
been six and a half weeks.
