"You're telling me that the reason I'm here could be spine herpes?"

Wherein I return from vacation and go straight to the hospital without passing go or having a ski weekend.

So California was predictably beautiful - I'm pretty sure I want to end up out there if it its deficit hasn't caused it to go full thunderdome by the time I'm through with school and in a place where I get to decide where I want to live.  There's something that's just really nice about walking around in 50 degree weather in January and still hearing people talk about how cold it is.  Y'all soft, west coast.

I was planning, upon my return from the warm wet west, to launch into a series of posts about the psychological and emotional hurdles that I've been going through trying to come to terms with certain aspects of my life as it stands now, namely the facts that I am moving forward (which is excellent) but with a tremendous and unshakable sense of being terribly behind (which is troubling).  There has been a lot of thought of about skin, in particular, physical and otherwise (it's a really versatile metaphor, you know), and how I'm finding I no longer really properly fit my own and I'm not sure whether to expect to anytime soon.  Anyway, all of that is going to have to wait, because something much more fun and interesting went down.


Namely, my MLK-weekend ski trip plans were waylaid by my getting spectacularly, "would-probably-have-peed-himself-had-he-not-sweat-out-all-the-fluids-in-his-body", hospitalize-ably sick.

I've been made aware by my doctor and the fine print on my med jars that one of the risks associated with the drugs I'm taking is that I basically have the immune system of a mid-19th century Russian royal.  Sort of the "if you cut me, do I not bleed potentially forever and probably get an infection that will lead to consumption?" school of biological defense.  That being the case, I'm apt to respond to what would be a minor infection in most other people by going full-on outbreak.   I've known of this risk, but aside from a particularly bogus cold I caught over Christmas, the reality of it hadn't really been driven home until this past Wednesday night when I went to bed all packed and ready to drive up to Vermont to ski the next day.  At bedtime, I was feeling what I would describe as a bit chilly.  By 3 in the morning, when I next woke up, I was feeling what I would describe as a bit being gripped by the balls by the icy hand of death.  Within about four hours I had run up a 103 fever and was so weak and lightheaded that the journey to the bathroom and back required a 40-minute restorative campout on the bathroom floor before it could be completed.  I crawled back into bed and waited for someone else in the house to wake up and take me to the hospital, periodically groaning to try to gently encourage that to occur sooner, rather than later.

It took nearly an hour, once the "to the hospital" course of action was decided upon, to actually get myself from my bed, to my pants, from my pants to into my pants, from into my pants to also into a shirt and thus a state that could be considered "fully dressed", from being fully dressed to sitting in a chair moderately nearer to the door, to outside, to in the car.  Believe me, I would not have listed those things as separate steps had each one not felt, at the time, like a momentous accomplishment.  Getting each pant leg on felt on a level with spitting defiantly into the face of the grim reaper.  And these were sweatpants; had I gone for something with less forgiving fabric or a more complicated fly mechanism it probably would have been the equivalent, in terms of effort expended, of jousting the four horsemen from the back of a puggle.


Once I was arranged in the passenger seat of the car I more or less promptly passed out, slipping back into consciousness at various points over the rest of the morning only when I needed to move or be moved (something that thankfully ended once I was on a gurney in the ER at Penn) or because someone needed to stick something sharp into me and thought it would be better if it wasn't a surprise (something that did not end, in fact that continued to reveal to me new and exciting places to be stuck, for the remainder of my three-day stay).  I was IV'd, blood-sampled, cat-scanned, chest X-rayed, heparin shot-ed, and asked by at least five different people to explain why I had come in ("because I am extremely sick" "Describe your symptoms" "I feel... extremely sick").  The highlight of day 1 came when, already delirious and out of it from fever and the various medications they had been pumping into me via IV, I was told by the nurse that she had an order for morphine for me.

"I don't think I need it," I said.
"The doctor ordered it - you're about to have a spinal tap done," she said.


"... All the morphine, please," I said.

Everyone said that the spinal tap/lumbar puncture procedure is not as bad as one imagines.  This was true for me, but I should clarify the following things by way of qualifying that:

• I was already delirious from fever and had almost no sense of what was happening.
• I was full of morphine and had almost no sense of what was happening.
• I'm pretty sure I drooled a few times during the procedure.
• I essentially expected it to feel like having a perfectly healthy tooth pulled out by someone with really jagged fingernails except instead of being pulled out of my mouth having it be pulled out of my spinal column, so really it could have felt like almost anything and it would have been better than what I expected.

It was, by these counts, not as bad as I thought it would be.  It was, however, pretty bad.  The first pass (and you already know that there's a problem, because there really shouldn't be more than one pass when it comes to putting a needle in between your vertebrae) was unsuccessful, so they had to re-numb (needle count so far 2 lidocaine injections, one missed spinal fluid draw, another lidocaine injection) and then go in again.  By whatever twist of nerve connections is going on back there, the worst pain of it wasn't even at the site of the needle but shooting from my groin down my right leg.  It sucked.

Of course, that was the worst of it.  A short while later I was moved up out of the emergency department into a real room, where they risked a combination of tylenol and IV fluids that was effective in bringing my fever down and in turn making me feel like I probably, no, almost definitely, was not going to die.

The next few days was a game of keeping my fever down (I became an expert at feeling the oncoming throb of the headache that signaled my temperature was climbing again and getting the nurse to plug some fluids into my IV line) and receiving daily "What We've Ruled Out" updates.  It wasn't bacterial meningitis (phew!), it wasn't traditional viral meningitis (slightly less, but still, phew!), it wasn't a bloodborne pathogen that was going to kill me within 24 hours (evident, at that point, but still...), but it still might be HSV.

"Wait, you're waiting on what?"
"HSV"
"Isn't that...?"
"Herpes Simplex Virus, yes."
"I'm in the hospital for herpes?"
"The virus that causes it, potentially, in your spinal fluid."
"You're telling me that the reason I'm here could be spine herpes?"
"I am not telling you that, exactly, no."
"Good, because I am not telling people that, even if that were true."

(PS, it wasn't HSV, and the final diagnosis they settled on was "unspecified meningitis" which is doctor code for "based on your symptoms we know where it was, but we don't exactly know what it was").

Once the HSV test came back negative (afternoon of day 3), I was released on a reduced med regimen (to let my immune system get post-industrial on the remnants of whatever was ailing me) and with a final needle wound tally as follows:

3 IV sites (wrist, crook of right elbow, back of right hand)
1 unsuccessful attempt at an IV site (back of left hand)
3 blood culture draw sites (back of right hand, left wrist, crook of left elbow)
3 other blood test draw sites (2 in crook of left elbow, 1 in crook of right elbow)
3 lidocaine injections (back)
2 lumbar puncture needle sites (back)
6 heparin shots (stomach)

I'm pretty sure next time I get a tattoo I won't even feel it.

PS.  Guapo sauce continues to be delicious.  I will continue to keep you updated on further developments in this area.