Bug Feast

Blood, liver, pancreas, heart, stomach; you name it my body is a banquet waiting to be devoured by insatiable, prolific and totally nasty narcissistic bacteria. A relentless attack force constantly probing for weakness the blasted bugs just won’t give up and they got me again so I’ve been a little lax in keeping this blog up to date the last couple of months. I’m temporarily back in nursing home again.

“What happened,” You ask? Well, even if you didn’t ask here’s the scoop. Since the end of December I’ve experienced reoccurring fevers as high as 102.8 degrees. After four trips to the doctor and emergency care, numerous tests and ultimately a hospital stay they finally found the problem.

Those sneaky little bugs have been hiding in my blood stream and it wasn’t until the results from some special blood tests that they found the problem. Along the way my veins got further damaged and I had several serious allergic reactions to contrast dye used in the CT scans and fluoroscope tests.

To continue, now that they have found the problem the cure seemed fairly straightforward. Pump me full of special antibiotics three times a day for the next four weeks. Seemed straightforward to the doctors that found the problem until they found out how bad my veins were. Originally they thought to just insert a PIC line in my arm and infuse the antibiotic using the PIC line but the technicians couldn’t insert a viable working PIC line.

After a few failed tries in my arms (resulting .long trailing bruises) a surgeon was called in to insert a working PIC line. Determining that my arm veins were not viable he decided to insert the equivalent in my neck. As they say, the third times a charm. The third time in my neck that is. Yes, it took three tries before they could get the blamed thing in but finally it got inserted. Doctor Frankenstein would be delighted by the tubes protruding from my neck!

I feel much better now but I have to live in a nursing home for about four weeks while I get my infusions and regain my strength. My fever seems to be gone and to tell the truth I’m mainly bored. I’ve been trying to connect to the Internet but the connection here, in the nursing home, is intermittent at best.

I have more doctors appointments starting tomorrow (today is Wednesday) and with the poor Internet connection I’m not sure when I can post this. I’ll just keep a running record going until I can post this entry.

I’ll close this section with a note on Grandma Oddball. She’s a real trooper. After settling me in the nursing home she promptly went home and got FOOD POISONING! Fevers, vomiting, diarrhea and an all day treatment at urgent care couldn’t keep her down. Even though she was so sick she managed to manage my care and bring me all my stuff while also going through with a previously scheduled doctors procedure. And on top of everything else tomorrow she plans on transmitting me to my doctors appointment.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Grandpa Oddball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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