This has not, entirely, been a great August for me, or really, a great year. A lot of things have improved, but some things haven't. This includes my health.
For the last two weeks, I've been fighting off walking pneumonia. I finally went in last Wednesday and got the obligatory Z-Pack and some stuff for the cough, and settled in for spending the rest of week in bed, sipping codeine syrup and hoping my immune system would purge the unbelievers deal with whatever was colonizing my lungs.
By Saturday I was feeling well enough to go to a party with some friends, though my appetite was acting strangely. A usually delicious smoked salmon and chevre crepe was inedible. Small things seemed to be edible. Most things weren't.
On Sunday, I woke up with my stomach in a lot of pain. A lot of very nauseated pain. Around noon, I started vomiting bloodily into the toilet. Any attempt to drink water ended the same way.
Weee-yooo. Off to the ER, courtesy of a helpful friend. Doctor says: either gastritis or some sort of tear in the esophagus brought on by intense vomiting. One anti-nausea prescription and an X-Ray later, I was booted back home on a diet of bland food and no alcohol for the next week or so.
I woke up around 4:30 to lose a few sips of water and to writhe around on the floor clutching my stomach in pain. When that faded, I called the on duty nurse and headed back to the hospital.
You know it's probably bad when they greet you at the desk of the ER with a bracelet ready and a room set aside. They got some saline set up, hit me with some anti-nausea stuff, and fed me a cocktail of stuff for my stomach that looked and tasted like glue.
By the time they were done, I'd gone through three bags of saline, two breathing treatments, the aforementioned anti-nausea and cocktail, and a ton of checks from nurses. The good news is, the hospital, Providence, has some really competent folks running their ER. They were all over the low oxygen levels and fast heart rate, and kept me until everything had stabilized sometime around noon.
Now I'm home with a large pile of medication and am no closer to knowing what the hell than I was before. Assuming this is gastritis, I can look forwards to 10-14 more days of anti-acid meds and anti-nausea stuff. I suspect that between that and any other complications, I will be sick through the end of this month.
And then there's four more months of fun to deal with. Screw 2013, can it be the new year yet?