Vixxie fights flesh-eating bacteria

Suddenly you get a fever. A lot of fever. A 40 degree fever that really should only happen to babies who had a couple of farts gone wrong. But there it is. 40 degrees fever on the thermometer, repeatedly for half a day now. And shear panic sets in. Because that little wound on your leg from a week ago is no longer a little wound. Yet you keep lying to yourself. Who are you fooling, at this point? Last week, has by now well become last month. For the past month or so, you’ve been trying to home remedy a small little wound caused by lymphedema. But it got bigger. Bigger. Bigger still. And then it got infected. So you prepare for a right well-deserved dressing down from your angry gp. Something about being stubborn and waiting too long before seeking medical help. You put on your brave big-girl pants and step into the doctor’s office. With a heart rate of 160, heaving like a fish on dry land, and ready to feint into a different plane of existence with every step you take. But there is no dressing down. There is just a worried look and a split second decision to call for an ambulance, straight to the emergency room.

And still you’re thinking woah, okay. A little much, mister medic. Vixxie is not shy of a lil’ drama, but sirens blaring, full throttle pedal to the metal, driving to the hospital? A bit much. So I thought fine, I’ll get it checked out. I’ll get some fluids to counter the fever, a couple of days of antibiotics and I’ll be as good as new. Tonight I’ll be in my bed sleeping off the sickies. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. The nurses and the doctors in the ER examined me up and down but didn’t seem too concerned. After administering an intravenous bag with fluids and antibiotics, I was told they were going to keep me overnight for observation. Because a small infection of some kind showed up in my bloodwork. More blood for hemoculture was taken. That is a medical laboratory test used to detect the presence of bacteria, fungi, or other microorganisms in a person’s bloodstream. And still, I wasn’t overly concerned even though I was still somewhat lucid at that point.

But day one in the hospital turned into day two. And then day three. The fever didn’t go down, only up. Neither did the heart stop working overtime. And that was serious cause for concern. The word sepsis came to nurses’ mind. Some unhealthy Googling sessions, combined with a hefty fever and a massive lack of sleep, threw me into a tailspin. There wasn’t much sleeping going on before with parameter check-ups and medication every odd hour of the night, but there was certainly even less sleep after hearing the word sepsis.

On the third morning in the hospital, I got my first visit from the doctor. I wasn’t really here nor there. I only remember her worried look and her words clearly imprinted in the back of my mind: “It’s not looking great. Streptococcus pyogenes in the blood, a flesh eating bacteria that we don’t like to see. Antibiotics not showing much result yet. This bacteria causes necrosis and spreads very fast, a scan of the leg and more blood samples are needed. Kidneys not doing great, extra plasma to help them cope. The fever needs go down right now”. Somewhat in that particular order.

If sepsis didn’t scare me yet, the thought of having my leg amputated sure did. My grandma’s toe got amputated. And then her foot. And then her leg. And then she died. “But she had diabetes, and I don’t” – I tried to reason with myself. Again, Google eased me down the rabbit hole, to a point that on the third night in the hospital, I started planning my funeral and getting my affairs in order. All the time you have when you don’t sleep, it’s amazing. But then again, reading that a progressed streptococcus bacteria in the blood often leads to fatality, it leaves very little to the imagination. There was only hoping that the infection had not spread to other organs or to my heart, and that the new antibiotics would kick in just in time to prevent further damage. If only we_could_get_that_freaking_fever_down. But there were no certainties. There were no guarantees. There was just anxiety.

Then it finally happened. In the morning of the fourth day in the hospital, 48 hours after administering a different antibiotic, the fever finally went down. And eventually disappeared. The fifth day of my hospital visit was the day of good news. The results of the scans showed no sign of necrosis. And as the doctor informed me of that, she sighed and sounded seriously “relieved”, which makes me believe that I must have dodged a real bullet there as the threat of having permanent damage to skin and muscle tissues was a lot more substantial than I realized. An examination of my heart also ruled out any infection to the heart valves. The blood results showed a much lower count of infected cells in the blood and since the fever had dissipated completely now, there was little concern for further contamination. Thursday truly was the day of miracles and redirected my mind back to looking forward to the future and to a (hopefully) full recovery. The thoughts of my impending demise were far from over, but at least there was some light at the end of the tunnel to hold onto.

All this time, I had not informed any family members of my misfortune, only my mother. I was very scarce with information, to not scare the living baby jebus out of her. To no avail though, I found out later she hadn’t slept for days either after being informed of my condition. I guess she hit the same Google results as I did. On the sixth day in hospital I started feeling better, I managed to sleep 3 hours at a time and the fog in my mind cleared slowly. Sure enough, the old fox was back to her old tricks, because I found myself moaning about the relentless failure of nurses to draw my blood. And when Vixxie finds the energy again to complain, you know she feels better. So I informed my family and friends of my uphill battles versus the evil flesh eating bacteria, but at that point was also able to tell them it was looking up for real.

But on that note though: How difficult can it be to actually find a vein in my arm???! I apparently have very deep lying veins. So deep, that after a couple of days, they resorted to inserting a Power Glide in my arm. Yeah man, I almost got a bionic arm like Jaxx from Mortal Combat!!! I mean, I got a special two-way IV drip inserted by an anesthesiologist through an echo, into a deeper major vein. So they could both administer medication AND draw blood from the same drip. Well, it hurt like fucking hell. Being a pincushion/voodoo doll getting probed with needles is one thing, but getting a power glide inserted in your arm is of a whole other level.

NEVER believe doctors telling you that it feels exactly the same as a normal IV. They are pathological liars. On top of the pain, the actual drip never worked. In the five days left in the hospital following the insertion, no single nurse ever managed to get a drop of blood from that special drip. All that pain, for nauuuuuuuuught. I still got woken up at 4 and 6 am by nurses sighing, cussing and getting irritated by my lack of puncturable vein. One nurse, called Jessica, got so worked up that she twisted and pulled the needle out in rage, doing some serious tearing up in my arm that left me fighting tears for minutes and caused a black bruise the size of a small apple. Karma has a special checkbox next to your name, Jessica. Needless to say (har har, I really went there), I got a bit wary of the vampires after that and started being increasingly vocal about being fed up with the failed prodding.

Being in the hospital when you’re too ill to function isn’t really all that bad. You’re being taken care of, you’re exactly where you need to be. But when you start getting better, every minute becomes an hour and every hour feels like an entire day. Netflix is a blessing, but there’s as much tv one can handle before being bored of that too.

I enjoyed observing the hospital life in full swing. There’s kind of a heartbeat, like a rhythm. In the morning, the hallways are bustling with nurses, with students, with doctors and their assistants doing their rounds. You get medical care, they check up on you, you get to shower. You don’t have a second to yourself to even start feeling lonely between breakfast and lunch. After lunch, the hustling and bustling slows down significantly. It feels as if you’re driving away from the busy big city to the quieter suburbs, leaving behind the swarm of work bees in constant movement. Around 2 to 3 pm, there is a shift of personnel and visitation hours begin, bringing a whole new vibe to the aisle. The sound of children visiting moms, dads, siblings or grandparents. The sound of people happily chatting. Or sometimes not all that happy. There was one day I could very distinctively hear someone wailing their gut out for hours on end. It was heart wrenching.

After dinner, when the evening starts to set in and the last guests are kindly requested to remove themselves from the aisle and their relatives, that’s when it starts to become really eerie. Most of the nurses have gone home. The night shift begins, leaving only a handful of people on duty. When dusk turns to dark outside, all the lights in the aisle turn off, aside from your personal little nightstand lighting. Nurses on the night shift have either cat blood, or night goggles because they appear to be doing everything in pitch black darkness. And it’s so incredibly, almost sinisterly quiet. See, I love silence. Living on a large intercity avenue, with schools, a hospital and a fire department in the vicinity… silence is a rare commodity for me. But when you’re awake in the middle of the night when you shouldn’t be, silence turns into a lot of opportunity for a wild imagination like my own to come to life. And when you’re sleep deprived, thoughts are completely unhinged.

.It’s always been my understanding that sleep is an important factor in any kind of recovery process. Then why do they not let you sleep in the hospital? Why am I being woken up 4 to 5 times a night? Seriously? You’re not telling me they can’t shoot up meds one extra time during the day just so you can have one less wake up call during the night. Either way, the nights were long. Really long. And towards the end of my stay in the hospital, I really started to dread them. I tried to find a sleeping pattern in between IV’s at 12PM, at 4AM, at 8AM and the regular blood drawing sessions at 6AM. But honestly, there wasn’t much sleep to be had.

So when the doctor came in on the 10th day of my hospital stay, to announce that I was being let go in the afternoon, I was so incredibly ecstatic. At first, but then anxiety took over. What if the bacteria weren’t really gone yet? What if the fever came back? What if they missed some necrosis and my foot would suddenly fall off on the way home? How would I take care of myself at home? What if I didn’t do it right, and I would cause more harm? Would I end up back in the hospital? I felt really torn. Part of me really wanted to get out of that hospital as fast as possible, but another part of me felt incredibly safe there. Fortunately I got prescribed antibiotics to treat a whole family of elephants for weeks, and a whole month of daily visits from a home nurse. So that gave me a little more peace of mind and made me feel less left to my own devices.

It’s been one day at the time since, even up til the time of writing this post a few weeks later.
The wounds closed up nicely and without complications. The compression therapy helped a lot, against all odds. My legs went back to normal-ish proportions.
One week after being back at home, on the exact same day I got back to work remotely from home (with both little piggies up on an ottoman) 🙂 I ended up back in the doctor’s office with fever. And obviously I was terrified for a relapse, but it turned out to be a viral infection. Yeah, I got a flu. Timing in life is everything, and clearly my timing is spot on. I got snot, a cough, chills and sweats, the whole shebang setting me back into a bedridden situation for the better part of another week. And it was pretty rough to process mentally as well. After vigorously washing and drying every piece of fabric I owned, scared of contamination, I developed an irrational fear of basically everything that could ultimately kill me. I haven’t necessarily turned into a germophobe, but more that I catch myself thinking about dying very often. Or all the things that could cause my demise. When I left the hospital a couple of weeks prior, the doctor told me that I was to expect a backlash. And I expected it to be physical, that I would be fatigued. That I would have a lot of sleep to catch up on. That it would be an uphill battle at times. And all of that happened exactly as predicted. But I would have never thought the backlash was also going to be emotional and psychological.

Yeah, one day at the time. We’ll get there.