I should probably explain the blog lacuna, the neglect of a month.
Without becoming overly detailed about it, I am allergic to a prescription. I was so good about taking it too. Usually I am not that good. It slowly poisoned me, caused my bone marrow to stop producing whatever it produces. This built up for about four months until about Halloween when it suddenly became noticeable. It got slowly worse thereafter and worse, then it got very bad very quickly. Then BLAM!
I did not get better as I supposed I would by simply stopping the prescription.
The last I mentioned in the previous comments, my family physician became alarmed by my call to his office that I made on Monday and that day he made the first house call in my experience. He did a blood draw here at my home. Called my home the next day reported the lab result and urged me to admit myself for a blood transfusion. I refused. I'm rather thick and stubborn that way. The next day he called again and urged me to admit myself again. I refused again. I pleaded my case that we knew what happened, stopped the cause, and that should automatically reverse things. He said, "But what if your bone marrow is just sitting there and not doing anything?"
I didn't think of that. He had me there. Plus, that's exactly what it felt like. I was getting worse. Coping was ever more difficult. Then Thursday, November 24th, Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., my physician called my home again to check. I was weaker than ever. He insisted I admit myself. I told him I didn't know how, that I couldn't drive nor could I even walk to the front to wait a cab. He said, "Just call 911 and get yourself admitted to hospital emergency now. You'll be feeling better in a few hours."
Liar. He knew that would not happen.
Maybe he meant "start" to feel better. I understood I'd be done and out of there in a few hours.
So I did call emergency. Within a few minutes my apartment is filled with emergency people. They put me on a gurney and off I went in an ambulance to hospital.
In the ambulance they put a needle into my inside elbow that was never used. Never used but refused to remove. Reason given, "We could need an extra input in an emergency. So the extra discomforting puncture stayed in place taped right into the joint continuously jabbing in case it might be needed. So annoying. If this ever happens again, I'll be pulling it out myself. Oops. And they can put another back in if they have such an unseen emergency occur.
Emergency room is a trip. They wrapped my arm in a blood-pressure monitor and the thing came on automatically every 15 minutes or so, inflated, measured and reported electronically, then deflated. Then fifteen minutes later, pump pump pump, there it goes again squeezing my arm.
Another blood draw. A lab report while still in emergency.
Apparently, their finding from the lab was alarming which caused them to move me to a nearby isolated room still in emergency. People came in and out wearing masks. Two doctors who looked to me like twins in their masks came in and told me they knew from the lab report that I was seriously vulnerable. They interrogated me.
Turns out they are not identical. One was slightly taller and wore glasses. Plus they have different names. They were adorable. I joked that I wouldn't be trusting the slightly shorter one because his name is Cyberg. I don't know how he spells it but I took it for Cyborg which was a stretch from Cylons, the human-like robots on Battleship Galactica. And Cyborgs simply cannot be trusted. Then the taller guy talked some more, then the shorter one said, "Wanna know something funny? I almost didn't get married because my wife didn't want to marry into some Science Fiction Cyborg, and almost didn't even date me, and then when we did marry she almost didn't take my name because of Battleship Galactica. She didn't want any association with science fiction at all. Then the tall guy with the glasses said, "We have a lot of questions to ask you. We must stick with the immediate issues at hand. May we please get straight on with it?" So he must have been the other guy's boss. Or maybe jealous for not having an awesome last name.
This is how they do things over there at the hospital. Everything is tag-teamed. Eventually after being admitted to the hospital proper teams of people came into my room in waves. Some later teams were comprised of members of previous teams. They identified themselves each time and explained the hierarchy but frankly I had trouble paying attention to the bureaucratic details.
Another blood draw. Another lab thing.
The hospital is a machine. Beds are cogs. The machine rolls along and all the gears fit together like a clock. It's all worked out, I suspect much of it propelled by litigation. Arm bands are scanned and everything is double checked. The plasma comes, scan scan, check check, scan check, scan check. Repeat three times.
Near the very end, an older guy who was the head doctor led a group of four other younger doctors, three I've seen before, came in to deliver grave news. Plus, they wanted to observe me longer. But I really REALLY REALLY did not want to stay another day beyond the transfusion.
The transfusion. Four units, 200 cc per unit. There happened to be on my table a plastic water jug with with ounces marked next to cc measurements. It held 28 oz. Turns out, 800 cc is the same as 27 oz, so almost a quart. Each bag takes at least two hours.
Throughout all this, wave after wave, people explained how close to catastrophe I had been. Throughout the Thanksgiving day, the night, the next morning until noon, teams of people impressed upon me how closely I had just come to dying. disaster, heart attack or possible stroke.
More than a few times on Thanksgiving day I was told by different teams in various ways that I nearly died. They all looked so urgent and so grave.
Apparently my doctor convinced me to call 911 just in time. Any further and I'd court a heart attack or stroke. As it is, the white bits in the blood are still alarmingly low so I've been told that I am still wide open vulnerable to all kind of foul infection.
Different teams told me different things, different numbers, and different fractions, and they used different vocabulary too, so I am quite confused about the whole thing, but I understood one person to say that I was running on 1/3 the volume of something, and then another person in a later team and a later lab result said I was running on 1/4 of something. I wondered if they were talking about the same thing. Another said something within my blood was the lowest he had ever seen. "It should be 30 and yours is 3", and then later "It should be 11 and yours is 2." I paid close attention but failed at grasping the details but I didn't care to have the details repeated. All of these fractions and new vocabulary meant nothing to me in those moments, but I did get it, whatever it is they are talking about, it's low.
Nobody goes home until the after the physical therapy team has their go on you. And you must await other formalities until release. The machine must grind through its own course.
I must note this oddity about the transfusion. While the plasma was going into me I was sitting there watching TV and the silliest things seemed tremendously funny to me. Even if something wasn't that funny, that somebody was trying to be funny was itself tremendously funny. I sat there laughing my ass off at the most ridiculous things. The Fruit of the LOOM guys come riding up on horses like knights of Yore and they toss a package of well-fitting t-shirts at a modern person. They're speaking as if they are heralding good news of the well-fitting t-shirts. Then the camera goes onto the black guy wearing the grapes costume and he says, "Wear them well!" That line, that delivery, that costume, the unseen direction, all added up to something terribly hilarious to me. The night staff at the center of the circular construction must have thought me a complete loon giggling like a girl inside my darkened room when I should have been in there suffering with uncomfortable needles in both my arms.
My new blood has made everything 10x more funny. I watched a South Park episode and split my sides laughing. I laugh at the straight story, at the meta story, at the method and technique, at the concept and the script, at Matt Stone and Trey Parker and the people at their company, at my family who wouldn't appreciate it, all the people at the hospital with English as second language who are saving my life but who would not get the jokes or the hilarity of the cut paper expressions. It was like isometric ab exercises. My stomach hurt from laughing so hard.
An older guy in a nearby room awakened at night alarmed and confused. He thought he was a prisoner. He could not be calmed.
The laughing fits continued when I got home and on to the next day and to the present.
A thing came on that was so stupid it could not possibly be this funny but it had me in stitches so bad I couldn't stop laughing if my life depended on it. It was a production tag, or something. A cartoon. A bear squatting behind a tree smoking a cigar or perhaps a pipe, and reading a newspaper. The bear then looks at the viewer and says,
"As a matter of fact I do."
The viewer then goes, "A matter of fact, do what?" Oh, shit in the woods! Ha ha ha ha ha.
That's an adage about certainty but stated as a question, as, "Is the pope Catholic?" Yes, of course, the pope is catholic.
It was and still is tremendously funny to me that somebody thought it a joke to refer to that adage by answering the question about the bear without actually asking the question with the sweary word it and then relying on the viewer to infer the question about the bear from the answer, the question that contains the unspoken sweary word and so causing you to think that sweary word inside your head, like ha, made you think it.
Even more funny knowing that no one in my own immediate family would bother to make the inference and so the joke presented of the cartoon bear would be lost on my family. They don't do jokes that require inferring. There'll be no working to get a joke. Then that became the thing that kept me laughing. I bonded with person who made a joke of the bear squatting behind a tree even though we do not know each other, and then that became funny.
Was the person whose blood is now coursing through my veins this easily amused?
Is having new blood a delight to my spirit?
I do not understand what is happening to me.
Conversely, I have no patience at all for serious subjects. It's like, "You're boring me!" *click* .
So that's where I'm at. Recovering from a rather serious blood and platelet loss and subsequent transfusion, greatly weakened, recovering slowly, more energetic now and much stronger than yesterday. I am presently catching up around here from coping with declining strength for so long, about a month. I've been scrubbing around like a little monkey house scrubber. I have loaded and unloaded the dishwasher twice. I jump up to get water and such.
I have not yet gone shopping. For a month now I've been living out of the freezer and out of the pantry which together are considerable. I've been clearing the refrigerator to virtually nothing. I have not had milk nor any Pepsi or juice, nor any fresh vegetables or herbs around here for a month. Shopping will be something of a breakthrough, I think. I look forward to doing that soon.
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