I have this nasty taste in my mouth. It doesn�t matter how many times I brush my teeth or what I eat, it�s still there. It�s sort of sour, but mostly just nasty, sort of like death has crawled in to my mouth, which is, I guess, sort of true, as I now have a gazillion bacteria dying throughout my body. It�s stale tasting. Makes my mouth feel slimy. But with a sweet aftertaste. So yes, death really is sweet.
The nasty taste in my mouth is preventing me from eating. It just sort of kills my appetite because I know that no matter what I eat, this presence in my mouth will still be there. But I force myself to eat. I can�t get better if I don�t have the fuel my body needs.
Okay, right this minute, there is this weird thing happening. When I stare at the computer screen and type, out of the corner of my eye, I catch this movement in my window, sort of like a branch moving in the wind. It happens ever 30 seconds or so. But when I turn to face the window to see what it was (especially since there are no trees outside of this particular window), nothing happens. I can stare at the window for several minutes. Nothing. I turn back to the computer screen and within 10 seconds, it happens. WTF? Okay, it seems to have stopped now. Strangeness. I�ll just chalk it up to sickly hallucinations.
So I continued to have a fever up until yesterday. 9 days straight with a fever. God, it has really exhausted me. And it�s not just the fever. I get a headache, there�s the pain in my abdomen, my muscles hurt, I get what feels like menstrual cramps (but is actually deflected pain from my bladder), nausea, bloody noses, I have mucous dripping down my throat, chills.. let�s see, what else? I had seen the doctor on Monday and started antibiotics that night. Tuesday was one of those days when I HAD to work. I have a training that needs to be completed ASAP and one of the classes scheduled that day was for all the supervisors and managers and our director. It was hard enough finding a time to get them all together, there was no way I could reschedule. So I doped myself up on Alleve and got through the day. Coming home, I was so exhausted. I was only at work from 12 to 4:30 but I was on my feet the whole time. I totally wore myself out. I fell asleep immediately after coming home. Wednesday, I was so wiped out I couldn�t even get out of bed. I didn�t watch any DVD�s because I didn�t have the energy to walk the THREE steps to the DVD player and pop one in. I barely could eat, or drink but I made myself.
Thursday was another day when I HAD to go to work. I was giving a presentation to the whole department of 120 people. There was no way it could be rescheduled. So again, I doped myself up and went to work. I only had to be there until 2:30 and then I was off to the doctor.
When I saw the doctor, she had gotten some of the tests back (the blood work and urine culture but not the blood culture) and we went over them. She said that if she had had the test results on Monday when she saw me (which of course was impossible), she would have just sent me straight to the hospital. I was THAT sick. In her words, I was �severely dehydrated�. I was drinking a lot, but the fever was just burning up all the fluid I was drinking. Also, a normal white blood cell count is between 4,000 and 11,000. Mine was over 26,000. More than 6 times the low end of the spectrum and more than double the high end of the spectrum. I was very sick. The good news is that the urine culture showed I was taking the right antibiotic. She re-tested my urine in the office (you know, the dipstick thang) and it was still infected but not as bad as Monday so she knew the antibiotics were working. She sent me to the hospital for an abdominal ultrasound to see how my kidney was doing as well. She said that she normally would do a CT Scan and was going to do one, but to do that they have to inject dye into the kidney. She said my kidney was so weak that the dye would cause kidney failure. How scary is that?!?!?
I am working from home today. Gets my work done and keeps me from calling in sick. I can lay down periodically so I don�t get exhausted, and since it�s a weekend, I have until Sunday night to finish. I have to get more blood work done this morning, so I want to get that out of the way and then I�ll settle down to working.
I actually do feel better today. I had a fever yesterday, but it wasn�t as high as they had been the last 8 days. I think that by Monday when I go back to work, I should be almost back to normal. I think the exhaustion will probably stay with me for a while, but at least I know I�m getting better. And hopefully, the blood work today and the ultrasound will have good news for me.
