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.

I was still sick

I just didn’t know how sick.

The next morning I still felt pretty bad.  My general rule was always that if I could work and it was safe for me to get back and forth (it was a long drive) I would go in – and try not to infect anyone else.  That usually meant that if I had a fever I stayed home.  The day after I started feeling sick I was already bad enough that I called in sick to work.

I tried to work from home and I did get some things done.  I don’t think it was much and I don’t really remember any of it.

But when I got home from the hospital a little more than two months later I logged on to my work email.  Don’t ask me why because I can’t give you a good explanation, something about work ethic or possibly my mental state.  Whatever.  But it did lead to a very funny moment.

When I checked my email I saw an exchange between me and some folks at work.  They were looking for some documents and hoping that I knew where some backups might be.  It turned out that I did know, I told them and things worked out OK.

The funny part to me is that I don’t remember any of this and I did the whole thing with a 103 fever.

I was barely coherent and no one on the other end knew it.  That struck me as being very funny.  I’m sure it says something about me, but I’m not sure what.

And it began

This is the day that I started feeling sick ten years ago.  It’s not really the beginning.  Allowing for the incubation period that was possibly two weeks earlier, but this is when I first noticed that something was going on.

I thought I had a cold.  We had taken our cats to the vet for routine stuff and as we left I started to feel a little light headed.  I could tell that something was wrong and that I was bad enough that I asked my wife to drive home.

I remember that moment very well.  I remember walking around to the passenger side of the car and seeing the sky.  It was a swath of purple with streaks of yellow and orange with the darkening blue sky pushing the sunset down to the horizon.  There was just the minimum of clouds needed to highlight the whole scene and add depth.

I remember that scene and it frightens me because I remember what came later.

After we got home I collapsed, but still thought I just had a cold.  That’s pretty much the theme here.

Personal History

Some time this week of July 2010 I contracted Legionnaires’ Disease.

That was the start of a whole mess of stuff and some of it is still going on today.