It's not even over yet, but I've already spent 24 of the worst hours of my life this weekend. It started with me attempting to cook and ended up with me in the Emergency Room.
I thought I had to be the worst cook in the world, but forensic analysis indicates that I'm just bad, but not necessarily the worst.
It all started around 8:00 pm on Thursday night when I set out to make some dinner. I opened the fridge and suddenly realized that I was supposed to have gone grocery shopping that day. There was very little in there to eat other than some ground beef three days past its Sell By date.
But no worries, I thought. I can make a casserole. I browned the meat and intended to simmer it in some pasta sauce. But it turns out I was out of that, too, so I decided to improvise and make it a Mexican Casserole by simmering the beef in canned chillis and peppers along with some enchilada sauce. After an hour, I poured the mixture over some egg noodles, covered it with grated cheese and baked it all for 30 minutes.
It tasted awful. The spice balance was off - the dish tasted neither Mexican nor American. But it was still "food," I reasoned, so I ate a plate of my concoction with the intention of food shopping the next day. I cleaned the dishes and around 10:00 pm sat down at the computer to play a video game.
But before too long, my posture felt extremely uncomfortable. My spine hurt, as if I had been sitting in the chair wrong or something. I got up to go flop on the sofa and as I did I realized my whole body was starting to ache.
But worse, when I stood up, I got hit by an intense wave of nausea. I ran to the bathroom expecting to get rid of that casserole experiment in my stomach, but nothing came up - just some painful dry retching, but no actual vomit.
I can't understate how violent the retching was. My whole body would convulse and I would involuntarily shout ("Grahhhk!"). It felt like my entire digestive system was trying to turn itself inside-out and I scared the shit out of the cats. But that damn casserole would just sit there in my stomach, and it felt like a brick. It was physically painful, and no amount of retching or induced vomiting could get it to move.
I found that if I laid on my back, the nausea would subside (at least until I got back up again). But even lying flat on my back, the muscle aches and pains made me miserable. This continued until about 2:00 am, when I finally decided that if I was just going to lay on my back, I might as well go to bed.
The muscle pain and the sensation of that brick in my stomach kept me from sleeping, and I just laid there all night. Eventually, I would decide that I was over the nausea, but if I stood back up to use the bathroom, it would return and I'd be back to the dry retching again.
The long night seemed to last forever. I may not have slept but as the sun started to come up, I slipped into some weird lucid dreams, indicating that I was at the very least not fully conscious. I stayed in bed late, not getting up until after 10:00 am, a good 12 hours after eating that damn casserole. The nausea immediately returned, and I realized that this was all more than merely "eating something disagreeable."
But I was exhausted from the sleepless night and all that retching. Plus, with that cursed casserole still in my stomach, I hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before. I was a wreck and spent most of the day Friday laying on my back, trying to no avail to find a comfortable position on the sofa, the loveseat, the futon, and the bed.
Finally, by the afternoon, I was able to stand up without the nausea returning, and I thought I might at last be finally getting out of woods, so to speak. I hadn't eaten anything for 24 hours at that point but I didn't feel hungry because that brick in my stomach made me feel full. But the pain in my stomach was now starting to feel like hunger pangs, so I attempted to eat some cereal.
It came back up again before I even got through the bowl.
I wasn't getting any better, and with no sleep and no nutrition, my body couldn't do much to heal itself. In fact, not to sound overly dramatic, I really felt like I was dying. I was no better 18 hours after eating the casserole, and many of the symptoms were if anything only getting worse. I didn't want to die a slow and painful death starving alone in my own home, so I drove to the Emergency Room at the nearest hospital, arriving around 4:30 pm.
If you know anything about me and how adverse I am to seeing doctors and falling into the hands of Big Pharma, you'll know how desperate I was in deciding to go to the ER.
I won't subject you to the long tedious story of waiting in the ER on a Friday afternoon and into the evening, but I will say that after an initial, entry-level exam, it took over 5 hours before I finally saw a doctor. They gave me bunches of blood tests, a CT scan, and a saline solution IV drip with some antibiotics.
At 1:30 Saturday morning, the doctor finally gave me my diagnosis - my condition had nothing to do with food poisoning, tainted beef, or anything else I ate. The CT scan showed no obstruction or mass in my digestive system. The bloodwork showed that I had, of all things, a urinary-track infection (I didn't even know men got UTIs), and what I felt as a brick in the pit of my stomach was actually an infected and enlarged bladder. The antibiotics they had given me were already starting to make me feel better, and the doctor prescribed me a regimen of home antibiotics for further treatment.
When I finally got back home at 2:30 am, I ate a bowl of soup (which is probably what I should have had for dinner on Thursday night). It stayed down. I went to bed and slept for some 10 hours. On Saturday, I was able to finally finish a bowl of cereal. I filled the prescription and finally did some long-overdue food shopping, and last night I even ate a bit of baked chicken and mac-and-cheese.
I'm still not 100%. Today, on this Day of Light, I still have some muscle pain, the kind that sometimes comes with a flu, and occasionally feel like I may be running a fever, although in this heat wave, it's hard to tell if I'm hot or if it's the whole world that's hot. But at least I'm on the road to recovery and no longer feel like I'm dying anymore.
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