Yesterday's Adventure in Medicine

Boy, was yesterday exciting!  While it would be more fun to save the punchline to the end, it wouldn't be nice, so I'll tell you up front that I'm fine except for a cold.  And I'll tell you how I know that so definitively.

I've been fighting a cold for the last week.  Over the last few days, it had turned nasty.  Yesterday, it turned scary, when my temperature began to creep up toward 100.  That's a scary number for me, so I loaded Robbie up into the van and headed for the near-by Urgent Care, where you can see a doctor on the weekend.  Enroute, I called Georgetown and asked to speak to the hematological oncologist on call.  Dr. Fitzgerald called me back.  She reassured me that the blood work I had done on Wednesday showed that my white blood cell counts were fine.  She told me "Go get your cold treated."  That made me happy.

I signed in at the Urgent Care, giving them my particulars including the chemo drugs I'm currently on.  I suddenly found myself whisked into the back ahead of several people and learned that the nurse on duty was an oncological nurse in her "day job".  I told her what Dr. Fitzgerald had said, but she just shook her head and said, "We really should be sure."  When the doctor came in, after obvious consultation with the good nurse, she said "We can't treat you here.  You need to go to an emergency room and get blood work done."  Crap!  I texted Liz, who was enroute from the airport after a week in Seattle, and told her to meet us at the Calvert Memorial Hospital emergency room.

In the meantime, it's creeping into my head that I might actually be neutropenic--that I might have had a white blood cell crash and that I was in for June 2009 all over again. Crap, Crap, CRAP!

Tim's vision:  I walk into the emergency room.  They take a two-tube blood sample.  After 30 minutes they come back and say that either I'm not neutropenic and give me some antibiotics, or that I am neutropenic, in which case I start driving for Georgetown.  In any case, I'm figuring an hour max at this hospital.

Reality:  I walk into the emergency room (here's where we diverge from Tim's vision).   Liz shows up (thank God), they haul me into the back into treatment/isolation room 11.  They give me a cup to pee in (?).  They give me a gown to put on.   A tech comes and takes me for two chest x-rays.  When I get back, they lay me down on the bed and began sticking electrodes on my chest.  The nurse confirms that, yes, my chest hair is too thick under the one for it to get a good reading, so we have to rip it off, trim the hair and reattach.  I confirm that waxing will never be an option for me.  They draw blood from my left arm, but leave in a catheter (?).   They later come and draw more blood from my right arm.  They make me hawk a loogie into a sample cup--no points for style or distance.

I'm becoming more paranoid and more convinced I'm neutropenic.  Liz and Robbie are in and out visiting.  They even embroidered a germ mask with my name.

Another nurse comes to get arterial blood for a blood gas test.  They draw it from my right wrist.   In case you've never had one of those, they kind of hurt.   I'm really getting paranoid.  Oh, they've now hooked me up to a saline IV.  I starting to feel like Gulliver shortly after he met the Lilliputians.  Oh great!  Now they want a throat swab.

Liz and I are game-planning what we have to do if the news comes back bad.

Finally, about three hours after I arrived at the hospital, a nurse comes in without a mask and says, "You're not neutropenic."  Whew!  Final diagnosis (I'm not kidding):  You have a cough.  A cough.  And an upper respiratory infection (the dreaded URI).   It takes about another hour to unhook everything, get my prescription written, and get out the door.

Let me say the staff at Calvert was uniformly professional and polite.  They did a great job, and as the doctor explained, when they hear they have a chemo patient with a fever coming in, it's like hearing they have an overweight smoker with chest pains.  There are certain precautions they take.

So good news is I know definitively that my blood counts are still good, that my pain threshold is still relatively high, and that I finally got my antibiotics and cough medicine.  The hydrocodone based cough medicine put me enough in la-la land that I overslept and missed choir practice this morning.  The fever has abated and all is (relatively) right with the world.

The End.