Cough of nothingness, this is pneumonia

Most people try to take care of an illness at home before heading out to the doctor’s office or even worse, the hospital. I poked through some books for herbal help, plenty of rest & fluids, no matter how much I drank nothing seemed to stay where it should. I was sweating out whatever I had ingested within minutes. The more I coughed my “cough of nothingness” the more I would sweat and feel horrible all over again. Some minutes would pass and I would be okay again, as okay as you can be bouncing between chills like you are in the Arctic and the Flames of Hell when it came to the fever.

I remember one night coughing my head off so bad that I actually took my necklace off (the one that never comes off) because I felt whatever was going on with me was so bad that I swore I was ready to start having convulsions in my sleep. Something was just really off and while I had no clue it would be this madness I knew it was something. I still remember feeling like I had lasers coming out of my eyes as the fever kept rising. Laser beam eyes, what geek girl does not want that?

When we headed to the doctor’s office they did the normal medical history check which for my family takes a good 15 minutes to explain the craziness of my family’s medical history. They took my weight, blood pressure and all of that fun jazz. The best part was seeing my BP, anyone that works with me understands that I joke weekly about my blood pressure being too high because we are just so amazing at what we do sometimes we have more work than we have hands for. I have a feeling I will not be joking about this anymore seeing as I do actually have high blood pressure and it was flipping out everyone that I came in contact with who kept reading the numbers two & three times.

This week my blood pressure seemed to be the biggest worry for everyone besides the fact that I was severely dehydrated. By the time we left the office after I refilled on my Zombie juice (IV) I left with three prescriptions and were told “plenty of rest and fluids”, then to come back the following day which we promptly did. I came back to have their startled face look at me like I was crazy since I had managed to drop two pounds in a day. I would have guessed water weight normally though after being dehydrated to the point of chapped lips which looks like dead zombie lips, that would not of course be the case.

The doctors had taken an x-ray the day before and found that two of my three lobes in my right lung were full of fluid, it came to be that viral and bacterial pneumonia was the random bug in my system throwing everything out of whack. Before I left the hospital they also gave me some paperwork on Community-acquired pneumonia and I have to say after a quick Google search nothing is more calming than reading:

CAP is an important cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide

For the past week I barely had an appetite but I was (as I always am) constantly thirsty, this is in part to using a personal vaporizer (I am not diabetic). They decided between all that they had found between my weight drop, my insane BP and the fact that after almost 24hrs I was not feeling better it was time to send me to the hospital.

I have to attempt, going there to valor parking and walking into my room skipping the admission process was a nice touch. We were in my room for a good hour before anyone really came to visit me, by the time the main doctor showed up he was quite confused why I was there which we of course did not find out about until we were being discharged. The doctor’s office gave us the impression that the pneumonia was so bad I would be going into the hospital to have a pleural tap.

I spent the first day getting random check in’s from the nurse’s who were all amazing, everyone was shocked as it seems I was more than half the age of their regular patients and it seems much nicer. What was I going to do, put up a fight in a hospital outnumbered with pneumonia? Run away? Yea, even the idea of walking quickly was a challenge at this point. The food was tolerable, compared to any other public foods it was decent and I was hungry. In the doctor’s office they had loaded me up with antibiotics after missing a vein in my right hand for an IV (it went through), then finally hitting the left arm. The hospital did the same (two bags via IV) but were better at hitting a vein on the first go. Thankfully care of an exceptional childhood (home visiting) doctor I have no needle fears.