Icetips Blog

What a week!

Sue and I had been working our little tails off to get her office painted over the weekend so I took some time off on Monday. Tuesday morning when I got up I felt a bit weird, but didn't really think about it that much. By 11:30 I was not feeling good at all. Very dry cough, aches all over my body, particularly in my right ribcage. An hour later I couldn't stand it any more and went to bed and hoped this would pass. It didn't. Got worse and Wednesday and Thursday I had fever around 102-103°F/38.9-39.4°C. No cold symptoms, no soar throat or runny nose, just pain in my right chest, both front, back and top, bones and muscle. The longest solid sleep I had Tuesday to Thursday was about 40 minutes. Couldn't lay on either side and I have always had real problem sleeping on my back so no matter what I did I was extremely uncomfortable. By Thursday I knew exactly what this was - infection in my lungs!

Diagnoses!

Friday morning I went to see my Nurse Practitioner, Bridget Kraft at the Primary Care Sequim clinic, who is very good. The first thing she said was "You are not feeling good!" I asked how she could tell. "I can see it and you don't come in unless you are really sick" She's right, I don't tend to go to a doctor unless I know and feel that something is just not right. She checked me front and back with the stethoscope and she did a test that I have never seen anyone do. She placed the stethoscope at a certain spot on the front ribcage and told me to say "eeeee" That was the revealing moment, she even called in a colleague to show her how this works! If the bronchi are clean the sound the doctor hear through the stethoscope will be exactly like that "eeeeee". But if the bronchi are plugged with something or are filled with water, the sound gets flatter and sounds like "aaaaaa" in the stethoscope. My NP said she had actually never heard this before but does this on patients where there is suspicion of some kind of lung inflammation. She ordered a chest X-Ray and blood work to see what the white blood cell count was and also to determine if this was bacterial or viral.

Healing

Only 2 hours after we got home she called me. They did not have the chest X-Ray yet but the blood work was very clear: "A raging bacterial infection" As I understand it there are 5 different types of white blood cells. She said this had normal levels between 4 and 20, but according to the only website I found that actually detail each one, it's normal up to 100. Mine was 20,000! At least two hundred times the normal level! No wonder I wasn't feeling good! She prescribed me some antibiotic, one 500mg pill every day for just 5 days and said I should start feeling better by last night. She was right. The fever was almost gone last night and I have not had any fever today. I slept for about solid 4 hours last night in one go, which was absolutely fantastic! When I woke up at about 5am I reached up to turn the light on and it was like something had been torn out of my chest. Worst pain I have ever felt in my entire life, but after that I haven't had a single jolt of pain in my chest cavity! I felt good enough to get out of bed and snoop around the house a bit, watching some TV and now, starting to do some computer work done - at least write this so people know I'm not dead! I am going to take it easy while I'm taking the medication. I have bad experience from starting too early and having a relapse!

History

24 years ago I was struck by a particularly nasty type of pneumonia. Back then I smoked and I had had a cold for a few days. Over night it turned really ugly. Fever at 103.5°F/39.7°C every day, no appetite, severe chest pains. Confirmed with chest X-Ray couple of days later and it was also mostly in the right lung. Was on antibiotics for a little over a week without any results whatsoever. Ended up in a hospital where I stayed about a week, think it was 10 day, but don't remember exactly how long. A guy who later became a very good friend of mine was in the same room as I was rolled into told me many years later that when he saw me his first reaction was: "This guy is going out in a box!" It took about a week at the hospital on some very heavy dose of antibiotics to get the fever down to normal. I was on a total of 2700mg a day for 3 weeks after I left the hospital. I was hovering at 60kg/132lb (I'm 6'2"/186cm tall and currently weigh around 99.5kg/220lb) when I left the hospital and by that time I just had gathered enough strength to walk up half a flight of stairs in the hospital building without taking a break! After I finally got out of bed I could only take 1-2 steps up at a time before having to rest.

Effects

One very long term effect of this pneumonia was that I lost a lot of my long term memory. Afterward I had to write everything down as I could not trust my memory at all. I could only remember a few hours back. I could not remember at night what I had done in the morning if it was to save my life! Years of memories from my childhood and teen years were just completely gone. I lost almost all memory from the summer of 1986! I remember being upset at my parents when I got home for not visiting me - they visited several times. Other family members visited and I had no recollection - still don't. It took the short part of the memory (events in the past hours and days) about 5-10 years to come back but the long time part of the long term memory (years, decades) took longer and it isn't really until the last 2-3 years that these memories are popping up, some of them all of a sudden without any particular prompting. It was like the fever had basically scrambled my brain and huge chunks of my memory were no unreadble. So for the past 20 years a side program has been running in my brain to unscramble all those memories and reconnect the synapses correctly. Our brain is certainly an awesome thing.

Living with pain

I have lived with several herniated and damaged disks in my back for a long time, one of them probably since early teens. Once I was run over by a bull, which is not a particularly fun experience I've tore the biceps tendon in my right arm, arm-wrestling with a 4x10'x3/4" sheet of plywood, thinking I was still 20 So I'm not exactly a newcomer to a bit of pain But I think these lung infections are the absolutely worst! You can get along by being careful with your back, doing exercises, having a chiropractor, a good one, adjust your back from time to time, which is what has kept me going for the past 10 years. The biceps tendon was repaired and I had no problems at all rehabilitating the arm (actually made a desk for Sue as an exercise and the sanding and staining and all the rest of the work was very good rehabilitation for me) The bull thing... Well, a bit more gray matter in the head would probably not hurt

But it is very, very difficult to adjust to a situation when you have serious trouble breathing! Like Dr. Jan Garavaglia, Medical Examiner often says on her TV show, Dr. G "It is just not compatible with life"

I am very, very, very happy that I'm getting better! Ok, enough of my medical history, I'll write about something a bit more positive next time

Arnor Baldvinsson