Last night was fun. I don't really wanna write a post about it but I feel like I've already had to explain it so many times it's just going to be easier to write it here rather than having to recount to everyone over and over.
So anyway last night I woke up at about 2:20am and I couldn't breathe. That's not unusual for me [I've been battling with a chest infection for about a week now] so I -- as calmly as I could -- rushed to the bathroom and ran a steaming hot shower and got under, just letting the water fall on my back. After a minute or two I felt like my airway had opened up a little and I tried to breathe deeper to encourage that.
Big. Mistake.
Almost immediately I started having these coughing spasms which resulted in me bringing up bloody, thick mucus. A heavy flow of it too, I felt like I was choking everytime I'd bring more up because I literally couldn't breathe for the amount of it that was coming up.
This obviously was a bit of a wake up for me and some bells rang in my head and I realised I needed to get my ass to hospital. I climbed out of the shower and got dressed, found some shoes [waking Steven in the process] and headed out.
I'm fairly familiar with my hospital by this point but the emergency ward [and I'm lead to believe, the entire general admissions area] are completely seperate from the radiation unit that I frequent. The nurse couldn't even find me on the computer until she came and got my medicare card and swiped it through her machine. I thought I'd feel a lot more familiar with the whole process than I actually did, so it was nice to know there was someone familiar in the waiting room for me.
The first thing the triage nurse realised and freaked out about [then tried to hide her freaking out'ness -- great poker face there lady] was that my oxygen [de?]saturation levels were waaaay too low, so I spent the first hour or so on a ventilator with pure oxygen trying to fix that.
After that she ran some tests, stuck some sticky things to me [and even now after having a shower I still cant get the sticky residue stuff off my skin], had me blow into like 5 different machines, did a chest xray, sat me on another ventilator with some actually medicated stuff this time which made me jittery as all hell.. until the doctor eventually came back and looked at all my results and basically said, "Yeah your chest infection is reaaaaaaaaaaaal infected, you can go home now".
... AWESOME. So after lazy doctor lady went away the nurse showed me the xrays and explained that basically my entire left lung was struggling with the infection and that's why I'd been coughing up the bloody mucus and struggling with my breathing and such. She gave me some steroids, some antibiotics and an inhaler [I'm a real geek now!!] and sent me home -- just in time to hit peak hour traffic with everyone going to work, yay! So yeah.. that's my story!
Now I'm just sitting at my computer surrounded by tissues and various medications, sipping at some water and wishing to GOD I could eat some double chocolate ice cream right now.
xx. A.
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