A Lot To Say and Don't Know Where To Start

This has been the week I almost became my mother.

I remember the faint burning in my chest to tell me that I was coming down with something. I remember the taste of illness in my mouth when I would cough. I don't remember how I got from the onset of a mild chest cold to the panting, dysneic existence I knew the night John rushed me to the emergency room. I just knew I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was dying. And the life of my mother flashed before my eyes, like her choices were manifesting themselves into what was to become of me. Alpha-1 Antitrypsin deficiency. That was all I could think. Genetic emphysema aggravated by several years of just plain ol' self-neglect in the form of Marlboro Lights. The last time I mentioned te disorder to a doctor, I was asked if I wanted to know how I would die. I said no. When death is the culmination of drowning in your own fluids, who wants to know of its appraoch? Certainly not me, so I declined the test. But this time, when I mentioned it to the pulmonologist, he didn't give me a choice. He just nodded and scribbled somethng down in my chart. An hour after he left, a lab tech showed up in my room to draw some blood. No questions asked. No chance to chicken out.

I will not die her death any more than I will live her life. The test was negatve. I have the time and the chance to make the choices necessary to ensure that I will not have the same demise. Those goals I have set for myself? They are still attainable. As I lay in that hospital bed this week, I told myself that, should the test be positive, I would abandon the whole doctor thing. I would instead focus on my son and my husband and live my life leaving well-enough alone.

Instead, I didn't have to make the choice. Instead, I was branded with bilateral pneumonia with secondary areas of atelectasis. In layman's terms? I had pneumonia in both lungs that was bad enough to require a week-long hospitalization, and was horrifying enough to cause some collapse of several lobes of my lungs. In other words yet? I became my patient. And for the first time in my life, I did not want a cigarette. I was scared. I was confronted with my own mortality. So now, here I am making soe major adjustments to my life.


Incidentally, this is what happens to an arm after 15 gazillion needle sticks and IV attempts.

Swine Flu B.S.

(* I found this pic on the internet. LOL)

I have had the sniffles and a sore throat for the past couple of days. I am obviously not feeling well, and as I cruise the halls of the the hospital while working, and encounter other healthcare professionals, I have heard nothing but the following: "You don't have the pig flu, do you?"

No. I do not have swine flu. Stop asking me. But I do have a patient whom we suspect does, and I will go no further than that. But let's talk about the pig flu, shall we? It has, thus far, caused no abnormal symptoms, save for the standard flu symptoms. And while the global death rate for influenza of which we are accustomed climbs into the thousands and thousands, at last check, swine flu has only caused a couple of hundred deaths worldwide. So why are we freaking out?

Well, this marks one of the first instances where we can catch an illness that has morphed from animals. (Not the first. Remember avian flu???) But everyone is in a dither about this. Everywhere I go on campus, there are signs posted on doors, windows, walls, about prevention of the swine flu. Seriously. Even my husband is not exempt. I mentioned that we had a suspected case, and he practically wanted to red-bag my clothes and burn them when I got home. I wanted them off as soon as possible just because I was dealing with influenza, and I have a child and husband at home who have not had the wealth of vaccines I have had due to my position in healthcare.

Maybe it is just me. I don't get worked up about MRSA or TB or influenza. I use precautions when dealing with these patients because I want to protect my other patients and my family by not becoming a vessel of illness. But most of this stuff is just common sense. Wash your hands, especially after touching something that a gazillion others touch, like door knobs, light switches...Make your loved ones and friends throw away their dirty tissues instead of laying them around. Sneeze or cough into a sleeve of tissue, then wash your hands anyway. Stay away from hospitals if you can. We try really hard, but hospitals are full of sick people. Those of us in their employ have someone in infection control to ensure we are protected. We try to protect visitors and patients too, but some people just do not listen. (Case in point: the suspected TB patient who SNUCK out of her room for a smoke!) Do not, by any means, be the idiot who has your 2 year old cruising the halls barefooted. No doubt, they are treading on c. diff and MRSA and VRSA and streptococci and anything else you can think of that settles to the floor of a busy ER.

So why am I not scared, other than reasons I just mentioned? There is not one single part of me that does not believe that I do not have MRSA all over me. If I were to get sick enough that they were to test me, I am sure I am completely colonized with it. I have had my flu vaccine, and I wash my hands before entering a room and before leaving. (That's a lot, for those of you who do not realize what it is that I do.) And in between those frequent washes, I sanitize. When someone is going to be coughing in my face, which is pretty much all of the time, I wear a mask. If I am going to get something on me, I wear a gown. When I get something on me when it was not anticipated, I bag my laundry, and either turn it in to the disinfecting gurus at the hospital or I wash it seperately with peroxide, then wash it again, by itself. And I wear gloves pretty much all of the time. My son and husband do not come to visit me at work. Common Sense, really. All of it.

Quit freaking out over swine flu. Because each year, as we get vaccines for new stuff, there will be other new stuff to emerge from which we are not protected. Viruses and bacteria are a clever sort. The morph and evolve too. Are we going to panic about every single one of them? Really? Calm down, says the Respiratory Therapist soon to have a degree in Molecular Biology. It'll really be okay.