Hospital Daze: Valentine's Day 2006

I....have been sitting on this couch, in this apartment --- since Friday. You would think I would have cabin fever, and perhaps I do. Cat-sitting is the least difficult job, it's figuring out what to do with your time that's insane. It just may be the laziest weekend of my entire life so far. I have done nothing but feed the cats and watch movies. My goal was to watch movies that everyone has been pushing me to see that I just haven't had the discipline to. So as of Friday I have seen:

And I've gotta say--they were all very good. The only one that bored me a bit was the first Lord of the Rings. But I am happy to say that the second one kicks fucking ass. Now my movie list is up to 951! With that being said, I am more than excited to get out of this apartment and DO things again. It was a very relaxing and fantastic weekend of clearing my head, and now I can go out and start February off well.

February has been a hard month for me emotionally. This part of my life has been talked about and everyone knows it happened but I've only ever written it down in sorrowful anecdotes in private journals. It's the biggest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life so far and I think about it everyday. So I am hoping that writing it out....ALL of it...will aid in my goal to continue in piecing together my mental health. Here it goes.

In February 2006 I was into my second year of high school. I was not at all a fan of high school but made my way through it nonetheless. In the end of January I started missing school because of a cold I had, I thought it was strepp so I went to see someone on island--unfortunately some kind of misunderstanding happened between my parents and I was brought to the wrong doctor. So I never saw anyone and just took it as a shitty cold. I ended up missing about two weeks of school and didn't seem to be getting any healthier. Then within the span of a night I had a fever of over 104 that refused to break, my left side hurt wicked bad every time I attempted to take a breath, I was sweating so much that I had to change my shirt every 20 minutes because it was so drenched. When it got to the point of trying to sleep in my bed, on the floor, on the couch, on the floor, in a chair, on the floor and beginning to hallucinate that I decided to wake up my mother to bring me to the hospital. At first she didn't believe that I needed to go until I told her my fever still hadn't broken from earlier in the night, so we got in the car and headed to the hospital. It was early in the morning and when we got to the hospital my legs started to give out on me. The feeling was the worst thing I had ever felt up until that point. We reached the front doors and I asked my mom to get me a wheelchair because I couldn't hold my own weight up anymore. She was very stern and told me, pretty much, that I was being a baby and that I could make it to the doctors office. Well...she was very very wrong. I ended up collapsing in the entrance of the hospital, and after that finally got a wheelchair. I remember having a large Nalgene water bottle with me and as much as I tried to drink the water that was in it I couldn't because nothing tasted good. The only thing that I had eaten in three days was peanut butter crackers without the peanut butter on them, everything tasted absolutely rancid [even water]. I was sitting outside of the doctor's office for what seemed like a million years when a nurse (and mother of a friend of mine from grade school) walked by and recognized me. She took one look at me, turned to my mother and said "she's whiter than a ghost-she needs to be in the ER right now" and wheeled my half unconscious self down to the ER. The next thing I know I'm on a long metal hospital table getting my clothes cut off of me and my rings and bracelets pulled off my fingers and arms. I felt like I was in a movie, I couldn't do anything but shiver and exist in misery; having no idea what was going on or where I was. I remember my mother trying to get a hold of my dad because she had no idea what was going on either. Then-the worst part of this entire experience...well...one of the worst parts. I had two nurses on each arm trying to find a vein, which none of them could do. My arms are bare of veins when I'm healthy and hydrated, and much harder to find when dehydrated. The only way I am able to describe what needle pricks in your arms when you're dehydrated feels like is razor blades sawing through your skin over and over and over again. It was a nightmare, I was naked on this operating table screaming at the top of my lungs with the only energy I had left in me. One of the nurses, Chris, began to cry and put the needle down and actually said "I can't do this to her anymore". That's when they (whoever "they" is) decided to medi-vac me out on a helicopter to Boston. The nurses wrapped me in a metal blanket and wheeled me on the helicopter. The entire ride to Boston I kept trying to look out the window but they wouldn't let me sit up (for obvious reasons). When we landed on the roof of Tufts this large, attractive, black man in a camouflage-army outfit and ray-bans wheeled me off the helicopter. I looked up at him while he was bringing me to the elevator and said "thanks bro!" and I remember him trying not to smile. I remember being wheeled down the hall of the children's hospital by two (once again: attractive) Asian doctors. They brought me in a room--asked me to count back from 10 and wouldn't you know it! I made it all the way to 7! I was knocked out for about a week.

FAST FORWARD

I wake up on valentine's day with a tube in my throat and nose, an IV in my left wrist, left forearm, right forearm, and two in my chest directly connected to my heart. I woke up to my sister Seniel (who I hadn't seen in months) her hands on mine and she is saying something to me, but I can't hear anything. Everyone in the room was kind of blurry but I could see their expressions were surprised to see me awake. I tried to tell my sister that she was beautiful, my mind was devoid of the thought that I couldn't speak because of the tubes in my throat. She understood what I was trying to say and smiled. I saw pictures that Sen had colored from a valentine's day coloring book taped to the wall by the TV. Other then that and this honking noise that sounded every time I moved, I don't remember much else about that day. The rest of my experience in the ICU was in and out, I couldn't communicate anything besides writing things down or signing them. I still have the pages of notes, everything is spelled wrong and basically isn't legible because of the amount of drugs I was on. Ah! I've written all of this without saying what the illness was: double pneumonia. I had pneumonia fluid in both of my lungs, I only had 1/4 of one lung working when I was admitted into the hospital. I lost about 30 pounds while I was sick. 

Hank The Tank

After an ample amount of time in the ICU I was moved up to the 7th floor of the hospital, it was like a ghost town up there, I was basically the only patient. Seniel was in a really bad place in her life at the time and decided to stay with me in the hospital, they even set up a cot in my room for her and everything. I remember a nurse came in one time and she was in the hospital bed and I was in the cot, the nurse had to ask which one of us was the patient. We had a lot of fun, surprisingly, we were able to act like kids and make each other laugh. I wasn't even thinking about being sick because I was so happy that she was there spending all of this time with me. It meant so much that she left her life in California to be with me. I truly believe that I woke up because of her. I hadn't moved after being put out until she showed up and I heard her voice.

There were so many people visiting me that were in and out of my room that I couldn't keep track of all of them. Granted I was exhausted 24 hours a day. One day I had a very well-known doctor come into my room and ask me if it was alright for his CLASS of med students to evaluate me individually. There must have been something like 20 students standing in the hallway waiting for me to say yes, so of course (even though I was barely conscious) I said yes. So one by one these students came in and took my vital signs, by the third student I was so exhausted and nauseated from being asked to "take a deep breath for me...and again....and again....again....aaaand one more time please" that I had to ask the doctor if they could just take my blood pressure or something instead of listening to my lungs. I simply could not take deep breaths yet without passing out. I also had a charity woman come in one time with this really old, ugly dog--she asked me if I would take a picture with it for their wall of....sickness..or something I have no idea. Needless to say I had a lot of visitors but even more mail! I was receiving gifts and letters from people I wasn't even friends with, people that I hadn't seen in years. But before I was coherent enough to read mail, I was being hand bathed by a nurse, fed through a feeding tube, using a catheter, and hooked up to twelve machines all pumping me with medicine. I was convinced that I wasn't going to make it and the doctor's that were treating me made it clear that I was not expected to get any better. Alas! I beat the odds and somehow made a turn around. My parents stayed with me in the hospital in shifts, my brother almost skipped his class trip to Germany to stay with me--luckily my mom convinced him to go.

I survived the illness after about a month of hell. Honestly the worst part of my being sick was the aftermath. When I got home I had to go to the on island hospital (which if you live here you know how awful the hospital is here) so I was terrified. I had to get more of the pneumonia fluid manually drained from my left lung. The doctor ended up using the wrong numbing agent and I felt the entire procedure. This is what I had done:

Once I was allowed to go home I was told to not leave the house, not let anyone come over to see me and to not go back to school for a while. I spiraled into the deepest depression of my life after that, and my new life of anxiety and life choices began. But that is a story for another day. For now I can gladly see that I am proud to be in a good place in my life, I am mentally stable (at least I like to think so) and I am truly grateful to be alive every day, because I really have stared death in the face and refused the chance to give up. So with that--do your best to remember that every single day, even the bad days, are worth it for your growth as a human being. We only have this life to prove whatever it is we WANT to prove to ourselves or anyone else. i am so so so absolutely happy that I survived and am able to say that I made it through a year-long depression deeper than the lowest ocean shelf. 

Remember where you stand.