Dandelyon's Worlds

This post is all medical TMI. Skip it if you don't want to follow along!

So, I thought I was feeling better, just exhausted. And maybe I was for a day or so while the paxlovid wasn't completely out of my system.

But now I'm always tired and always symptomatic. Runny nose, cough (sometimes productive), chest tightness, waves of exhaustion, doing any little thing tires me out, sometimes wobbly and lightheaded, sometimes brain fogged. It was bad enough Sunday night, and consistent enough Sunday night that I ended up with a trip to the hospital to make sure I wasn't having a heart attack. The symptoms matched the older-woman-quiet-heart-attack symptoms exactly, and when my father was two years younger than me, he had a "silent" (non-painful) heart attack. Some time ago, my mother made sure I knew that since he also had sleep apnea, though he wasn't getting treated for the apnea because he wouldn't go see a doctor for it.

So, I will be getting a bunch of expensive bills coming to me down the line. Ugh. But at least now I know that unless my vital signs go wonky or it feels different, I can safely just go to sleep when my chest is bothering me.

And as to how long this will take for me to get over? Nobody knows. I'm in this limbo were I might feel good for a couple of minutes or hours, and then wobbly and horrible for at least that long, with no way to predict if I can do more than eat and fall asleep again.

Oh, and I took pictures of the horribly painful skin reaction where the dumb leads were glued to me for a whole 7 hours. I don't know if a hospital can do anything about preventing that if they're warned, but I can at least ask..

I also told every nurse and doctor that they could NOT give me any pills with corn in them on the way in, and then the doc wanted to give me Ibuprophen for my chest discomfort, and the nurse had totally forgotten that when she came with it, and so I got to remind her about the corn allergy. Then the pill sat there for an hour while she investigated, and then she admitted it did, indeed, have corn in it and took it away.

My veins were totally uncooperative too. The first blood draw was useless--after a couple of tries, they got some blood, but the trauma of getting it meant they couldn't run the tests they needed. It took about 5 tries to get an IV into my arm, and it didn't last. They were able to take blood about two hours after they placed it, but by the next time they wanted to do a test it was useless--and it didn't bleed when they took it out either. Then they tried another five times before they were able to get blood, and 3/4 of the back of my hand is still purple from the eventual successful attempt. I'll count my blessings--the bruises look bad, but they don't hurt anywhere near as badly as the skin reaction from the glue on the leads.

And, of course, they didn't have a CPAP for me in the ER, so there was no resting to be had.

I am totally dreading that I may someday have to be in the hospital for real. I have severe doubts that they can safely feed me or give me pills. I have to tell them not to put the bandaids they have on hand on me.

I guess I'd just better try to stay healthy.

Not that that's been working very well, lately, mind you.

To my friends here:

In general, I love it if people visit my old posts and leave comments--real ones, anyway.

If anyone sees a post they love and finds comments disabled, it's because the spammers decided it was a good place to leave lots of comments for me to delete. I have better things to do with my time--so if you want to comment on one of those entries, send a message or comment here or something, ok?

Thanks!

To the evil spammers: I'm not going to unscreen your mis-spelled advertisements and phishing attempts, so stop wasting my time (and yours)!

Now, back to house cleaning...

Deleting spam comments is NOT a satisfactory break from OMG-it's-almost-winter-heating-season cleaning.