B vs. MRSA

Happy Monday! I don't usually welcome the start of the workweek with such vigor, but I also don't usually spend my weekends in the hospital certain I'm dying.

Let me start from the beginning. This past weekend was uneventful, but the weekend before was one of the worst in recent history. It started the same as most: I was working late Thursday night like always, mentally prepping myself for my Friday and ready for the weekend, one that was meant to be spent getting my brake maintenance done and just generally relaxing. Instead, things went entirely downhill.

I had noticed that my eye was a bit swollen under my eyebrow, but figured it was just due to the ingrown hair I had scratched earlier. I thought nothing more of it until I woke up Friday morning with my eye swollen down into my eyelid, making it difficult to fully open. I got through to my doctor's office first thing, who informed me that I had a staph infection, and subsequently shot me up with antibiotics* and sent me home with two more. He said he was treating it aggressively given that the weekend was starting, but that it probably wouldn't be a big deal. He also told me that if it started to take a turn for the worse, to go immediately to the ER.

(*I am horrified to note that I fainted after the shot. They didn't warn me that I might feel a bit of a rush after the shot - in my butt I might add - and I went to stand out and passed out. This is the same doctor's office where I threw up on a nurse when I had rotavirus. Any suggestions for local PCPs are welcome LOL)

Anyhow, I took the rest of the day off, seeing as how I was still feeling a bit woozy, and went home to rest. The rest of the day passed by uneventfully compared to the morning, aside from the redness and pain in my eye causing a bit of an inconvenience. I was hopeful the antibiotics would kick in by morning, and so I called it an early night and hoped for the best!

Fast forward to 2AM, and I woke up with a raging fever and an eye that was swollen completely shut. Wanting to err on the side of caution for the sake of preserving my eyesight, I woke up David and together we carted all three of us off to the ER.

The one good thing about the ER at 2:30AM is that there isn't much of a wait. Instead, or perhaps because I looked like the hunchback and was scaring small children, they took me directly back. I'm the type of person who always wonders if they're overreacting, but I knew immediately I wasn't when they hooked me up to an IV, explaining that they'd be giving me a morphine drip for the pain (it was intense) and would be giving me three separate antibiotics over the course of several hours. I also had to be taken in for a CAT scan to make sure that only the eye socket and surrounding tissue were involved, and that my actual eyeball was not infected - an infection that could lead quickly to blindness. Holy scary! David took the baby home to rest, since they said I would likely be either admitted or there at least until morning, and I got dosed up on all kinds of drugs. Note to self: do not update Facebook status on morphine, or take the chance your grandmother will be able to quote you as saying you're "high as a kite". Oops.

I'd love to say that's the end of the story, but it's not. Not even close. To make a long story a bit shorter, though, here's the abbreviated version. I was discharged around 9AM, sent home with painkillers and three new antibiotics, and went home to rest. I slept basically until 3:30pm, while D took Ava to a birthday party (what an angel!) on a mere few hours or sleep, but was woken up by intense nausea and a migraine so intense I could barely function. With the swelling in my eye increasing and the pain enough to make me scream, back to the ER we went, the entire time me telling David that I was certain the infection had spread to my brain and giving him instructions on Ava. I was THAT convinced I was going to die. It may be humorous now in retrospect, but I have never, ever, ever felt that bad in my entire life. Scary.

Once we were back at the ER, the news was grim, but the prognosis was good. I wasn't dying, I was just suffering from an intense and severe case of MRSA, the terrifying, antibiotic-resistant strain of staph that has circulated through the news for it's severity. Noting the increased swelling (which was the reason behind the intense pain in my head), the doctor on duty notified me that he'd be cutting into and draining the abscess on my eye in order to clean out the infection, and inserting antibiotic gauze that would have to be removed the following day, with a third trip to the ER. Super duper. They came in and gave me a shot of morphine, then inserted a liquid nerve block into my eye to do the procedure. It didn't take more than ten minutes, but nothing like "don't move, or I may end up sticking the needle into your eye" to make ten minutes feel like an eternity.

Though the worst was over, I then started to throw up repeatedly. Over, and over, and over. Mrs. D had come to be with me at the hospital so David and Ava could have a break for dinner and so I wouldn't have to be alone, and she then proceeded to drive me home, only for me to throw up in her car. Awesome. The weekend just kept on getting better.

I am happy to say that I'm better now, though it wasn't an easy journey. My future FIL had to come and stay with us to help out since I was completely out of commission, and we existed on take out and a slightly lesser version of clean for several days. Even now, I'm just starting to get my energy back, and the nausea didn't subside until they changed my antibiotics yet again.

The one thing I can say, though, is that Mondays are pretty damn awesome. Any day that's not spent in an ER or mentally preparing my will or one in which I'm able to find the energy to play with my daughter is now the best day ever!