Well, I just got out of the hospital. On Wednesday, after I made that post about spiking a fever very early in the morning, I spiked a fever again, about 2 hours before my regularly scheduled doctor's appointment. I took Tylenol and crawled under the covers until the shakes stopped, then got ready to go. I had my son drive me to the doc's. Good thing, because he sent me to the emergency room - the same one from early in the morning - for a CT scan - normal, with bone and brain intact - and drainage and to start treatment. My WBC count was 42, with normal being 4 to 11, so they knew this was an infection. The ER doc drained this thing, and it produced about 30 cc of pus; this was no cyst but a raging abscess. I was admitted that night. IV antibiotics every 6 hours round the clock. They did blood cultures in addition to culturing the stuff that drained. The blood cultures stayed negative, so the infection had stayed localized. Took them a few days to identify just what kind of bacteria we were dealing with, and then it turns out to be a strep that's normally found in one's mouth and is harmless there. It's also a cause of bacterial endocarditis, so an echocardiogram was ordered and was normal; they did find a heart, though
Yesterday the infectious disease specialist called in a hematologist to check my blood work and see if he may be missing something since my WBC count was still elevated at 18 (but it was still decreased from the previous day and had been decreasing since I was admitted). The hematologist saw me afterwards and said that everything looked normal and I'm probably just having a slow response to the antibiotics. I start to think I'm gonna go home soon.
Today around 1 PM a technician comes into my room and says that one of my docs has ordered a test that was gonna take a few hours. At that point I just melt down completely. No doc had been in to see me yet, and no one had mentioned anything about any test to me yesterday (this was to be an iridium scan, where they take blood out, label the WBCs with iridium, then reinfuse the blood and see where the WBCs migrate, to check for other sites of infection or other pathology), and I just wanted to go home because my 2 or 3 night stay had turned into 6, and I needed to get back to work 'cause I'm self-employed and my clients are understanding but not *that* understanding. The nurse called both my admitting doc and Dr. Perez to say that I was quite upset about this since it was a surprise. Dr. Perez got to my room a short while later and apologized profusely. Apparently he had written the order before the hematologist had seen me, and after speaking with the hematologist he decided the test wasn't necessary but neglected to cancel the order; he also forgot to mention it to me yesterday, for which he also apologized. My admitting doc got to the room and the docs agreed that there really was no reason to keep me in the hospital, so they let me go home.
I'm not completely done with this thing yet. I'm on antibiotics for another 2 weeks, at least, and a visiting nurse is supposed to come over every day starting tomorrow to do daily dressing changes; I can't exactly do this myself 'cause it's on the back of my head. I go back to my doc on Friday for follow-up blood work, and if this doesn't get better or flares up I'll deal with it then.
I'm just happy to be home :-)
The Other Kim kimagreenfieldatyahoodotcom