So I’ve been ill for like a week now. This is annoying as hell to me because I’m usually very healthy. At some point last week I had a migraine which was a first, but recovered from that and was feeling pretty ok by around mid week.
When all this snow hit this weekend, I found myself outside a whole bunch shoveling and whatnot which must’ve resulted in me to catch something. I had a pretty miserable sore throat which isn’t uncommon for me in the winter, but this one was accompanied by a fever which made things rough. On Friday, I got anti-biotics for strep throat and just laid low for a few days. I found that when I tried to sleep at night, I would get the highest fevers and all that and started having like fever dreams type things. I would wake up in the middle of the night because I thought people were bothering me in my dreams… It truly was bizarre.
My goal in all of this was to be recovered by Monday so I could go an work in the city on Monday and Tuesday, so when Sunday came around and I was actually feeling better, I thought all my resting had helped. I had been eating mostly liquids all weekend because my stomach was feeling a tad bit uneasy. I went to bed on Sunday night with only a small fever and a sore throat (an improvement to the nights prior) and ended up waking up about an hour later because my stomach felt bloated. I got up and watched tv for a bit and then proceeded to throw up literally everything I had in my stomach (which wasn’t much).
I ended up throwing up about once every hour until around 4am. I decided it probably would be best for me not to work that morning and made the decision to stay home and rest. However, in between all this vomiting I was having trouble getting back to sleep and my stomach still felt as if it was churning. Between the nausea, fever, strep throat, and stomach pains, I decided it was best to go to the hospital.
So at around 6 am my mom drove me to the Emergency Room; it was the first time I had been since I was little kid. I got assigned to a little hospital bed and sort of writhed in pain for a couple of hours while we waited for a nurse to see me. She took my temperature and everything and then left me to writhe for a bit longer. The doctor finally came in and took a look at me and told me that I had dehydrated myself by all the vomiting and that I had drained a lot of the fluids in my body. So I writhed a bit more, and eventually another nurse came into my room and but an iv into my hand and proceeded to slowly drip a few massive bags of fluids into blood through my hand. The process took forever, but by the end of it, I finally felt as if I wasn’t going to die.
Moral of the story: Dehydration is a big deal and Emergency Rooms take a long time. I was in there for five or six hours yesterday morning and I’d really hate to have to go there again. I’m still feeling pretty ill right now, but I don’t feel faint or anything like that anymore. I do miss eating solid foods though.
This is me now:
A tad pale, a little dizzy, a touch of a fever, and a hell of a sore throat.
Definitely an improvement though…
-Rob
