Torn and Her Thoughts

It all started with a mild myalgia. The sort that always tend to sort itself out by the early morning hours, and when you were fully awake, it was gone, just as quietly as it had crept up on you the previous night.  After a day of shopping for my big day, it came.  I thought it was just post-duty weariness.  Then morning was pure agony.  Myalgia of the severest sort, tight air entry, wheezs BLF, wheals, periorbital edema, urticaria, beginning laryngeal edema, high grade fever, anorexia, the works…It got worst by midday and I had to beg Janina to come home from the clinic and give me Diphen IM.  But she couldn’t, or rather, wouldn’t, and so I ended up giving it to myself via direct IV, with Ben holding my left arm, acting as a human-tourniquet. Then the stupor set in.  It is after all possible to live and not actually live.  The anorexia was scary.  That was the first time I actually did not want anything to eat during a fever, a high grade one at that.  Then the hydrophobia.  The headache set in on the second day and it was nightmarish.  An astounding 6.5/10 in the neurologic scale of 1 to 10’s.  Not as severe as an SAH maybe, but just as startling. I’m not one to experience headaches and migraines, so it was pretty much startling to have a head ache that bad.  For the next 5 days or so, all I did was lie in bed, eat a few morsels of food, drink gatorade and then c2 apple when I have finally gotten so nauseous with the blue liquid, take a leak, take my oral meds, or when that got tough, insert a paracetamel 125 mg suppository (all 4 of them) q4, and sleep, sleep, sleep.  I slept 20-22 hours out of 24.  I wonder why I never saw such symptoms in my patients.  It was ridiculous how tired I felt, or how achy, how nauseous, how weak I got to be in those 5 short days before the reluctant trek to the hospital. DF was a revelation to me.  For the first time in my life, I actually got so scared of taking my oral meds.  I couldn’t even get myself to swallow a whole Paracetamol without retching. It got that bad.  I was always good in taking medications.  Even during my childhood years when Auntie had to prod Bom with a spoonful of sugar to make him take the Paracetamol underneath, I had already been a good medicine-taker.  I was, I can say, a precocious medicine taker.  So it was a frightening disappointment to actually get scared of taking oral meds. I’ve always believed the doctor should set the perfect example.  Doctors shouldn’t be afraid of lab exams, or procedures or trivial things such as taking oral meds whole.  I never was afraid of the needle or of procedures, or even of operations.  I owe that much to my patients: coax them to become brave because I myself was brave.  So it surprises me no end that nobody ever wrote of DF this way.  It only said "back-break fever" in literature.  Why didn’t anybody chronicle how horrid the constitutional symptoms became in days 2-5 of this raging illnes.  I might sound feverish until now but it was scary, and it really felt physcially bad.  So many firsts happened during this time, and it was a learning experiene.

For the first time in my life, I learned how to vomit.  For the life of me, I have no memory of ever vomiting from age 2 onwards.  Nothing had ever made me vomit.  Not the gangrenous smell of a diabetic foot about to be amputated, not the smell of massive hematochezia, or even of melena during a manual fecal extraction, not the sight of  mangled bodies, victims of a vehicular accident gone terrribly, terribly bad,  not an all-nighter of binge drinking during the early days of youth and  revolution.  Not even the smell of vomit, the only human excreta I can’t stand, had ever made me vomit.  But DF made me.  It was along the gutter, outside 1623 Maria Orosa street, while holding on to a tree in the side walk, that Ben taught me how to vomit.  It was after the ride from Madocs.  For the past two days I have been retching.  Countless times I have stood beside the toilet bowl, willing my innards to come gushing out, but nothing ever, ever came out.  And so I prided myself, kidded myself, that no, I was not about to vomit.  I was going to set the world record: the person who grew to a grand old age but never vomited, even regurgitated! But that record is lost for good, for in the early evening of August 22nd, I was comforted by my hero of a boyfriend while I vomited noisily in full view of the guard and passers by.  The guard even went inside and got an umbrella for Ben to hold because it was raining while I was vomiting.  Hardly the stuff of romance novels. I didn’t want to be held.  I just wanted to be left alone, in the madness of my pursuit for relief, there in the gutter of Orosa. Relief came, and that was how it was. 

UST was full.  I contemplated on Metro but decided I needed to go to a place where I will be admitted without the usual circus, and so decided on UERM where Calox was on duty that night.  In less than 5 minutes Calox had deftly (with much pressure from me to get it right the 1st time) inserted a gauge 22 and had D5NSS running for 6 hours to hydrate me.  I was dehydrated, sort of dizzy, but afebrile and that was what scared me. From day 1 afebrile, my platelet count dropped from 76 to 30 to 20 in a matter of 12 hours.  I felt in my heart of hearts that it wasn’t time to go yet, and so there was no bleeding.  I asked God what the plan was, and His answer was that I not bleed. 

7 days Ben stood by me.  He missed school, missed rest and relaxation, missed the quiet life, and pretty much everything else in between.  But he never complained and he never left my side.  What did I do to deserve this beautiful, beautiful man (inside out) who cared for me like crazy?  It is one of my life’s greatest miracles until now.

Friends came.  Those few who knew.  Of course there were Kuya Boy, Janina, Nels, and MJ. Mae was so sweet to come by.  My in-laws came, Nanay and Nitzyn. There was Ate Claire.  Krigi came, and I really enjoyed my time with her.  Then Ate She, Ate Jak, Kuya Arnold.  Even Dr. Q came.  It was like a party of sorts.  It was after all just after my birthday.  The big event, with all the planning, the details..none of them ever materialized because of DF.

Was it worth missing my brithday for?  It was.  DF was a revelation, a time for first times, a time for halting and breathing, and rediscovering.  A time when the healer experiences healing.  Trivial as it may sound, my DF was atypical.  It didn’t conform to what the textbooks said, nor was it predictable or boring.  Just as I am atypical, and so it was that my malady was just that. Illnesses are really quite fascinating.  No wonder I’m a doctor.