Off to the doctor and then some

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.