Another year, another trip to the hostibule. Apparently this is what I do now.
Last Saturday (21 January) I had a weird pain on the inside of my left knee. It ran more or less along the line of the muscle there. That’s the muscle I get a cramp in if I get dehydrated overnight. So I figured I was dehydrated and went on with my day. It didn’t quite get better, but it wasn’t too bad so I ignored it and went to bed. Sunday it still hurt and by the middle of the day I thought I’d managed to pull the muscle.
Monday it still hurt, but I have a job so I went to work. Took it easy on the walking (luckily my day job allows me to do so) to see if that would help. That evening Stacie looked at it and noticed it was turning pink. That’s not a muscle pull. Suggested if it didn’t get any better the next day we get it looked at after work. OK, no problem.
Tuesday at work it kept getting steadily worse and felt like it was spreading. Went home to change my pants assuming I’d get looked at and be sent home with some antibiotics, maybe some painkillers. Stacie came upstairs while I was changing and suggested we be proactive and pack like I was going to end up staying. So I threw a couple of things into my work bag, packed up the laptop, grabbed my charger and little travel bag. Then we headed to the hostibule – the hostibule is also where my primary care, pharmacy, and just about everything else is. Urgent Care had a 3-4 hour wait, but the ER was pretty empty. ER, here we go.
ER asks what’s up, I explain the situation, I get into triage within five or ten minutes, they look at it, and tell me to have a seat. Five minutes after I sit down, they get me into a room and start really looking at it. Based on the rapid spread, my medical history, and everything else, they decided pretty quickly that I would need IV antibiotics. Meaning I’d be staying a while.
Spent the night in the ER because the hostibule was full. The hostibule was busy enough, in fact, that they eventually had to stick me way off in the corner of the postnatal ward. That was fine until someone decided they needed to keep the bed rails up, effectively trapping me in the bed because of the weird equipment bolted to the foot of it. I’m dibetic. I pee a lot. Can you not effectively chain me to the bed when I’m not a gorram fall risk? The best part was when something jacked up the door when they took me to get a CAT scan so they had to move me to a different room. Bed rails went up and they forgot my call button so I can’t even call to get let out of the crib. So at one point I was reduced to yanking off all the sensors so they would think I was having a heart attack or something.
Got into an actual Hostibule room Wednesday morning around 11. The initial test results came back saying it was strep. I’ve had a nasty strep infection in my right leg. Nasty enough that the doctors told me I was somewhat lucky to be keeping my lower leg.
Which was exactly why Stacie and I went right to “get this looked at now and accept they might be keeping me.” Over the next several days that thought process would be confirmed a Good Thing by several doctors.
Wednesday IV was a nice, quick injection instead of a long IV drip. So basically Wednesday and Thursday were pretty relaxed affairs of hanging out, screwing around on my phone and laptop, getting a bit of Monkey Business done, and enjoying the hostibule food. Not as much BSing with nurses as usual because the hostibule was jam-packed. No big deal, they have jobs and I’m perfectly capable of keeping myself entertained. Pretty standard hostibule visit so far. Things were going well enough that they were planning to send me home Friday.
Then Friday rolled around. The doctor in charge of my case (good guy, he was in charge of my leg wound last year) came in for the morning update and mentioned I was getting weird temperature fluctuations since I’d been there. Nothing life-threatening, but not what he wanted to see in a patient with an infection severe enough for IV antibiotics. Since they were waiting on my most recent blood cultures because of a “hitchhiker bug” of some kind that may or may not be an issue, and since I have a history of certain other somewhat terrifying infections, that added another level of caution. He informed me that while I was tentatively still leaving that evening if my temperature went over 100° I would be sticking around a while longer. OK, fair enough.
Sure enough, the next time the nurse took my vitals I was at 102°. Time for bigger, badder, more thorough antibiotics. The kind that are four-hour drips rather than injected slugs.
Over the course of the weekend, they narrowed it down to pseudomonas. That stuff had been in my leg wound the year before, and was the specific bug the doctor was most concerned about.
This bug is such a concern I was considered in isolation the entire time I was there because of my history with it. I learned that when I overheard one of the nurses on Wednesday or Thursday mention it to another nurse. When I asked what was going on (I’d noticed everyone double-gowning over their scrubs when they came in), the nurse confirmed I was in isolation because of my previous bout with pseudomonas and it was just a precaution. Fair enough, especially when I was on a floor containing tiny, tiny babies whose immune systems hadn’t had a chance to be patched yet.
And it can kill you. Apparently if it’s in your blood you are in not-insignificant danger of it moving into something important like your lungs or main pump and just killing you. So that was fun.
Weekend went without any real issues. IVs, hostibule food, goofing off in my bed. Infectious Disease doc swung by Monday to let me know I was officially out of the really dangerous part and could go home that night. Turned out I had strep, pseudomonas, and a few other hitchhikers. Luckily, all of these bugs respond well to the antibiotics they planned to give me for the pseudomonas, so I was good to go.
That said, it still hurts and the big nasty spot on my knee started draining yesterday. And by “started draining,” I mean “I leaned wrong, put pressure on it just the right way, one of the blisters that had shown up that morning popped, and over the course of half an hour about half a cup of nastiness came out of there in what started as a stream like my knee was pissing brownish pink fluid and eventually slowed to an annoying trickle.”
One upside: that big nasty open wound I’ve been fighting since last April also responded to the IV antibiotics. It looks like the healing process accelerated by a month or three.
One thought on “Hostibule 2023”