Caricatures of the Spectre of Influenza
So I put off getting my flu shot in 2018…
Y’know, I ain’t around these parts too much anymore (Yahoo can go huff a dong), but I just wanted to tell y’all my tale of the 2018/2019 holiday season…
December 17-20: Got the flu (later confirmed to be one of the strains protected by this season’s vaccine). Felt shite, took cold meds, still felt shite but not so much that I could justify not starting the Q1 spreadsheets at work.
Dec 21: Knew the crackles in my lungs were pneumonia. Couldn’t keep my blood oxygen above 90%. Went to the ER that night. They wanted to send me home. I said “I know something is wrong, I would be very uncomfortable going home.” They managed to find a bed in the hospital, said “fine, we’ll give you observation until tomorrow.”
Dec 22: Decompensated quickly. Parents apparently came up north, though I don’t remember seeing them before I woke up again. Couldn’t get aortic O2 saturation above 65% so I ended up intubated.
Late Dec 22-Early Dec 30: Completely unconscious, with the first two days on paralytics so that the ventilator did 100% of my breathing. The 36 hours on either side of my sedation are completely blank in my memory.
At some point my secondary infection (which was never discerned, though extensive testing for bacteria and fungi was done) caused me to become critically ill, and there were preparations made to fly my to Mayo for ECMO. Thankfully, the high-dosage steroid treatment they gave me when I started getting worse helped, and I began improving slowly.
Dec 31: I start to see the world again. My first “memories” are strange delusions brought on by the anesthetics. I thought I had been in a coma for 6 years, and that I was in Cleveland. Why the fuck would I be in CLEVELAND?
I remember seeing the news, something about New Year’s Eve. I fell back asleep, into Seroquel dreams.
Jan 1: My memories start genuinely coming back. I discovered I was too weak to extend my arm fully, and too shaky to eat Jell-O. The Jell-O DID get delightfully wobbly, though.
Jan 2: Little Raven’s Birthday. Finally get out of ICU. Moved up to the general wards. Still can’t breathe easily. Food is vile-tasting. Can barely eat. Choke down a lemon bar and cry about how much better Brendan’s were and how much I miss my brother and how I refuse to make my parents go through that again.
Jan 3: Manage my first wobbly steps with a walker. The floor hurts my knees and feet. The blood in my eyes is finally being cleared by my body.
Jan 3-5: Slow improvement. Slow for an otherwise-healthy young adult, at least. It feels like forever. My dad and I watched an unbearable amount of cross-country ski qualifying races for the Olympic teams. There’s a terrifying night-vision cam in my hospital room, which wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t have a creepy smiley face.
Jan 5-9: Transitional care, getting physical and occupational therapy. I finally got home to my apartment (and cat!) that afternoon. I spent the next week regaining my strength and seeing specialists to try and find out why I got so sick. Consensus so far is “flu sucks and you’re unlucky?” I’m hoping to have better answers next month at my secondary follow-ups.
I aged my husband and parents about a decade during my hospital stay. I missed a month of work and am still fixing problems that arose with the backlog.
My Christmas dinner was a 10% dextrose solution, since I was still paralyzed and couldn’t have anything down my NG tube yet. New Year’s Eve drinks? “GIVE ME SOME FUCKING WATER!” - but not being able to have any, because I was still overloaded with fluid due to the standard protocol to prevent hypoperfusion when someone goes into septic shock.
Just to make it clear: I would not have survived without the tens of thousands of hours of training and practice that my medical team devoted their lives to acquiring. I would not have survived without the millions of hours of research and trials that allowed the machines that kept me monitored, cooled when my fever continued to spike, and breathing in a life-sustaining way when my lungs weren’t able to exchange gasses.
I am a fat bitch, but I am physically active, eat fairly decently, and don’t smoke or drink excessively. I am not someone who “should” be threatened by deadly complications due to influenza-caused pneumonia. Yet I was.
And YOU could be, too. Get yer flu shot, if you can. If you can’t, yell at others until they do.
It’s not too late in the season, trust me. People still die in March. People like you.
