The past year or so I've thought many times, "Wow, this stage of life is hard...maybe that means better things are to come," and then, somehow, something happens that makes me think everything's going down the crapper. Not complaining, just reflecting and trying to figure it all out.
Parenting a child who has lived through several emotional traumas within the first year of his life along with some developmental delays has proven to be more difficult than I had imagined. It doesn't help that I've been sick and haven't felt well the majority of the time. I had cytomegalovirus and Hepatitis E at the same time and I believe I contracted them both from Silas.
We had been home a month and it was already time for me to go back to work. Another huge transition in a short time for my body. It was the last 4 1/2 weeks of school and I was determined to finish the year off right. The first two weeks, I started to get headaches that I attributed to tiredness and transition. The next week, I was taking Advil around the clock to keep the headaches at bay and some were even migraines. That last week, I started having body aches that felt like fever although I didn't have fever and the fatigue was overwhelming. I went to the doctor on that Friday because I knew something was wrong. They ran bloodwork and told me that it was just stress and I wasn't sleeping well and that's why I was having the headaches. Saturday afternoon I started running fever and I stayed in bed most of the weekend.
There were only two days left of school and I hadn't let my principal know I wasn't coming back the next year, or even started packing up my classroom so I knew I had to make it to work...but there was no way. I stayed at home that Monday and called to let the doctor's office know I had been running fever. They looked at my labs and saw that my urine report was abnormal so they prescribed Cipro and called it a UTI (although I had no symptoms other than back pain) and I figured it was a bad kidney infection. I made myself go to work on Tuesday, the last day of school. I handed over my resignation letter, packed up my classroom, and told my students whom I loved, goodbye for the last time. All the while, I was running a high fever and was almost delirious from that and the headache. The next couple of days I needed others to take care of my kids while I stayed in bed. My fever came and went and I called to let the doctors know the antibiotics weren't working so they called in another UTI antibiotic. Deep down, I knew that wasn't the problem.
Thursday night, I started feeling so much worse. I thought maybe it was mono due to the amount of fatigue I had been experiencing and the ongoing fever. I went to the clinic at Walmart to see if they could run a quick mono test. The nurse practitioner there ran a full set of blood work and also a mono test that came back negative. She was extremely concerned because someone of my age, who is otherwise healthy, should not be experiencing symptoms like that. She told me I was very dehydrated and if she could hook me up to a bag of fluids, she would do it right then! I left there that night with no more answers than the fact that it wasn't mono. She said she would call me the next morning when the rest of the blood work came back.
Friday morning, I get a call. She said I need to get to a doctor very soon because my liver enzymes were elevated and the differential showed there was some type of viral infection in my body. I was supposed to go to a walk in clinic on the other side of town right after lunch to be seen. That doctor didn't care about my liver, she was really concerned about my kidneys! She banged around on my back and put me in more pain than I could bare and they did another urine culture and found lots of blood. My white count was still low (meaning no bacterial infection!!) but she prescribed high dose levaquin and told me that if I still have a fever in 24 hours, I needed to go to the ER. On the way home, I was feeling worse and worse...although, I don't know how it could have gotten worse. I laid down in my bed and decided within 30 minutes it was time for the ER. On a Friday afternoon, really? This ought to be fun.
We waited for a few hours and I can't describe the headache and body pain I was feeling. I knew my fever was going up and I was scared. Finally, we got back there and I was so dehydrated they had a hard time getting the IV in. The doctors were baffled at my history of a month long headache and the run around I've had by several doctors in the past week. There's no telling what I was exposed to during both recent Ethiopia trips so their minds are swirling trying to figure out what possibly could be wrong with me....
I'm tired of typing and I'm sure you're tired of reading. To be continued.
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