I am not easily intimidated. I have been sick a long time. I am used to being around hospitals, doctors and sick people. I am used to reading lab work and pathology reports. I have seen a lot of people pull out of medical crises. I have seen my intestine attached to the outside of my body, emptied colostomy bags, packed my own incisions, accessed my own port. It takes a lot to scare me.
Waking up with a fever of 103.2 two days after dental work scared the shit out of me. It’s kind of funny in hindsight in a morbid way: infectious diseases microbiologist develops tests for bloodstream infections, gets bloodstream infection. But it wasn’t funny then. I am very even when I speak to providers who don’t know me because my life could literally depend on it. I was even that day, but it took a lot of effort.
I was discharged after a few days of antibiotics and continued them at home for another week. I called out of work, a rare instance of sick time rather than working from home, because I was so exhausted and winded that it was difficult to do anything. In 2014, when the shit really hit the fan, standing up was enough to make me sweat, my heart race and blood pressure drop. It felt like that again. Like anything but being in bed was too physically demanding and being awake was too mentally demanding.
In the days after discharge, I lay in bed thinking about deconditioning and POTS and anaphylaxis and what if I had to start all over again? There isn’t a word for what I was experiencing. If we had a word for the crescendo to blind panic, the choking and the blood pounding before you scream, that might be it. What if I got these nine months of improvement and this was it?
The first few days back at work were very hard, my blood pressure was low and my mouth still hurt a lot. I had appointments last week at the hospital and one of my doctors is pretty convinced that I had a true bloodstream infection that just didn’t culture because of the antibiotics. I slept most of this weekend. But things are coming back together.
This past year, it was easy to settle back into a routine, to prioritize certain things over the things I had always dreamt of pursuing. It feels foolish now to have done that. I cannot take for granted that the way I have felt is the way I will continue to feel. If I hadn’t been on antibiotics since the dental procedure, this story could have ended very differently, with my port being pulled and time in the ICU to treat a bloodstream infection and anaphylaxis and months of recovery.
Life is short. All important things are derivative of this. Every lesson is secretly the same.