An Inauspicious Beginning

January is a popular time to visit the Emergency Department. I walked in there on MLK Day, after my husband dropped me off and went to look for parking, and instantly thought it might be a bad idea. After being wanded by security, I got to the waiting room and saw nary a chair available. They had even brought out spares from storage, I could tell, and were at full capacity. I started to panic that I’d be waiting out here for hours, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to physically hold myself up. A few hours earlier, I’d had to cut short a wait in the pharmacy line (also a busy place) because I was too weak to stand for ten minutes. Still, I wasn’t sure that I needed emergency attention as bad as any of the folks around me, so I was hesitant to take up space. I thought it might be a “Here, have some Tylenol and go to bed” situation.

I’d been sick for four days. On the third day, I consulted a medical provider via video call. She didn’t seem to account for my rapid heartbeat, nor did she ask for my current temperature or how my lungs were feeling. I told her I’d just gotten done traveling home from Georgia and thought I might have pneumonia. She didn’t think pneumonia could have developed that quickly—exactly what calculus she used, I don’t know—and prescribed me an inhaler and some cough drops. It was after I tried, and failed, to pick up those meds the next day that I started to feel something was really wrong. I’d already been bedridden since I returned home from the airport on Friday, having been through a miserably long day of travel from Atlanta to L.A. to Portland. I had sat with my head down on the airplane toilet, worried I would throw up. I had sweated through my T-shirt, on a bitterly cold night, while riding a shuttle bus back to my town. I continued to sweat through two pairs of pajamas in my bed, where I splayed out next to a display of sick-person supplies on the other side where my husband should have been: water, cough drops, pulse oximeter, thermometer, tissues. After my fever spiked to 103 degrees on Saturday, I figured that was going to be the last of it. As a healthy person, I usually recover quickly from respiratory illnesses, aside from COVID, which I’d tested negative for (twice) this time.

But Sunday night, the evening after I’d talked to the virtual doctor, found me nearly hallucinatory as I tried to sleep. My head felt woozy, my temperature seemed to be fluctuating, and my heart was consistently thumping at 115 beats per minute, as if I was taking a brisk walk. I’d hardly been able to eat anything. My son was going about his routines without me, passing by my bedroom door again and again, untouchable because I didn’t want to make him sick. I had already been away on a business trip for six days, and now I couldn’t care for him or even really reconnect with him. The idea made me weep. I truly worried that he’d never get to have his mom again—that I might fall asleep tonight and not wake up the next morning.

The fear of death persisted into the next day. My husband was prepared for me to request transport to the hospital, but I held out until late in the afternoon, waiting to see if my rapid heartbeat would abate or my blood oxygen would rise to a healthier level. They didn’t, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw heavily lidded eyes that spoke to my tenuous hold on consciousness. So we dropped our son with the neighbors and went to the emergency room. The triage nurse bumped me to the front of the pack when my heart rate measured 145, which is about the top of the range for someone my age doing aerobics. I had not so much as walked around the block in four days. They started hooking me up to an EKG machine and I promptly dry heaved into an emesis bag.

Funnily enough I started to feel marginally better after the nausea; I told the nurse that I was going to feel really dumb if all I’d needed was to vomit. He reminded me that I still wasn’t looking so good. I had almost fainted during the vomiting episode, so on top of being extremely sweaty I was probably very pale. They wheeled me to a room where I slowly, carefully climbed onto the gurney I’d be lying on for the next eight hours. After blood tests, X-rays, and a nasopharyngeal swab, it was determined that I indeed had bacterial pneumonia. This was about halfway through the night, and my husband had long ago left to take care of our son. I texted him updates and went back to trying to watch HGTV on the little television set in my room. I received three liters of fluids, two bags of IV antibiotics, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen before being discharged.

My Uber driver, who picked me up around 1:00 AM, commiserated with the diagnosis. He used to live in Indiana, he said, and got pneumonia regularly because of the cold. “Yes!” I said, “I just got back from Georgia where they made us go on a bird hunt in 30-degree, dry, windy weather.” I was resentful of that outing, which had taken place the previous Thursday, the day before I flew home. My throat started feeling scratchy that night after my face had been wind-whipped for several hours. I believe I wouldn’t have gotten sick if my airway hadn’t gotten so irritated, forming nooks and crannies in which bacteria could thrive and multiply. It threw a damper on what had otherwise been a very enjoyable trip.

My hospital treatments did not provide instant relief. The next morning, I still felt too weak to drive my son to school. I spent the day propped up in bed once again, not seeing anything change about my symptoms other than my head feeling slightly clearer. I was keenly aware that my discharge instructions said to call 911 if anything got worse. I felt on the verge of getting worse. It took another day for my heart rate to drop below 100, which I celebrated as a turning point. I guess I might not die, I texted to my husband across the house. My temperature had also fallen below 100, and my headache had lifted without the aid of ibuprofen.

I’ve now finished five days’ worth of follow-up antibiotics. I’m still coughing up phlegm, and my lungs feel quite tired. Between the business trip (yes, my work trip involved hunting) and the illness, I haven’t been at my real job in two weeks. What an inauspicious start to the year.