THREE WEEKS OF HELL

My so-called flu blossomed into a 3-week nightmare. The coughing spells, which were part of the flu, or so I thought, became quite severe, causing pain to my ribs so much so that I had to hold my ribcage and sit upright to cough. But it didn't help. And the cough was deep in my lung area and almost non-stop. It was Victoria Day here in Canada, the long week-end, and my husband and I finally decided I better get to a walk-in clinic as fast as we could. It was 5:00 in the afternoon. We went to 3 different ones, and each one was closed. We had no choice but to go to Emergency at the hospital.

I felt guilty: somehow a terrible cough , body aches and lethargy don't warrant the attention of Emergency doctors the way broken limbs, etc. do. But we were there. The rigmarole that you have to go through is unbelievable. First the nurse calls your name, asks for symptoms, takes your temp and blood pressure. Then you go and sit down and wait to be called to register: OHIP, address, phone number, etc. and then you're given the proverbial paper wrist bracelet, which indicates that you are now the property of the hospital. After registering, we were told to literally follow the red arrows on the floor to the section where a doctor would eventually see us.

We waited approximately 45 minutes. Finally we were seen. The ER doctor looked at my throat from a distance, listened to my lungs for one brief second, told me he could hear wheezing, and declared I had viral bronchitis. He prescribed a puffer, steroids for one week and codeine cough syrup, because I told him to please give me something to make me sleep through the night because I couldn't stand the racking cough any longer.

From there we went to the pharmacy, paid a small fortune and took my drugs home. I went to bed and didn't get out of it for virtually 3 weeks!!!

A week later and nothing was helping. I was as weak as a kitten, the cough was still very severe, and get this: I got laryngitis. Laryngitis meaning I was absolutely unable to speak. And if I tried, I was exhausted. And then, if all this wasn't enough, one evening, as usual, I took the 1 teaspoon of codeine cough syrup before trying to sleep. I had been taking it every night since the ER visit of course and it put me to sleep until the morning each time. This night was to be different. About twenty minutes after taking it, I suddenly developed what I though were gas pains in the area of my diaphragm. I was lying on the bed, and all of a sudden, I was writhing in pain. I instinctively forced myself upright and started to walk around the upstairs trying to expell gas from wherever it would mercifully escape. You cannot begin to imagine the pain I was experiencing. The walking wasn't working and I was beginning to panic. My husband heard me walking around, came upstairs and decided that some Pepto Bismal would settle my stomach. Wanting to believe him, I gulped some down. He then went down to the basement to his office to continue working, convinced that I was going to be OK. Minutes later, I became severely nauseated and ran to the toilet, where absolutely nothing happened excepted the most awful gagging.

The pain was beyond anything I could explain, and in my anguish, because I couldn't speak (the laryngitis), I found a book on my night table and sent it crashing to the floor below. My husband came running up the stairs, took one look at me, and said we were going back to the ER. It was about 11:30 at night by this time. I agreed of course. I was in my pajamas and he kept insisting I dress. There was no way. He put on some clothes and I lay down on the bed, and all of a sudden, the pain stopped. Literally. It was over, just like that. I started to cry from the sheer exhaustion of it all, which only upset him more, and he kept insisting that we go, and I was trying to tell him in my raspish whisper of a voice, that I was really better, and the tears were more for relief than anything else. He was beside himself and actually called my sister on the phone, at 12:00 midnight to get her to make me go. I was able to whisper to her what happened and that I was better.

The next morning, quite exhausted, and still very sick, , I e-mailed my sister to please call my doctor. I had an appointment that very day.

My husband dragged me down there, virtually. I was able to rasp out what had happened at the ER. She listened to my lungs, told me my lymph nodes under my chin were swollen, and I shouldn't still be this sick. She said this could possible be bacterial and not viral as the ER doctor had thought and let's be safe. She immediately sent me down for a chest x-ray, blood work, prescribed heavy duty horse-size antibiotics, and told me to go home, rest, continue using the puffer and she wanted to see me in one week's time.

That was Monday, May 26th. By Wednesday, the cough had all but disappeared but my energy was still around zero, which was a lot better than the minus numbers it had been for the previous weeks. I had to push myself to do anything and still have to at various times throughout the day, but I was told this was normal for bronchitis. The energy is the last thing to come back, and takes it's sweet time.

During all of this, my husband was a King of Kings. He cooked, brought food up to me, cleaned as best he could, and was there for me throughout the whole ordeal. I don't know what I would have done without him there for me.

The whole thing was quite the experience, simply because I never get sick. I'm just one of those people who, up until this time, had had no more than a cold. The laryngitis continued for seven days. Apparently, the coughing had been severe enough to bruise the vocal chords, and only time would fix it.

But today is June 2nd, Monday. I saw the doctor earlier, and she informed me the blood work had come back showing bacteria and the chest x-ray, thank God, was clear. She was glad to see that I was looking more human than the last time she had seen me. She wants more bloodwork just to make sure the bacteria was out of my system. I thanked her profusely and that was that!