Good Vibes and Omming for Robert

It's a bit angst making.

Remember Cav had bad fevers?!

Olga, this seems very serious. Why he was sent home, what the ****.

On the other hand, we don't know anything at all.

He just tweeted that he was fine and feeling silly because of all the attention.

as he should.


good for him...

Oh, thank god. ****, we love him.


(batter thy crags, o sea)

Of course, I did my best to be cheering and uplifting:

Ok, very well.

Jeeze, this is a bit embarrassing. I suppose I started it by saying "This flu is so bad that I don't feel the slightest bit silly about occasonally wondering whether I will survive it" on twitter but once that fever was gone it did, in fact, feel silly.

But I feel perfectly fine now, and have no fever pain or anything at all. I'm just taking it easy for right now because yesterday in the morning I felt the same way but ended up in ER in the night. But this time I really think it will stick, I think the doctors nailed the missing part of my self-diagnosis and self-medication.

Because of all the attention this got I'll tell the story once and try to head back to rest and the work that is piling up on me and maybe have to answer less later.

This week started with a perfect storm of work problems and I did what I normally do in those situations and stopped sleeping. Seems like it was bad timing to do that when I was about to get sick because it made my immune system very weak and on the third day I thought I was exhausted and went to bed. I woke up with the fever of my life, pain all over my body, and a stabbing pain in my lungs (which was clearly an infection). It was very flu-like at this time and because I have no thermometer I wasn't completely aware of how high the fever was until I saw the skin and realized the fish I was trying to pass between tanks didn't exist anymore (good thing too, cause I imagined that I pulled both fins off one in the process and was really down about that for about an hour cause we had to flush him and then I remembered how cruel a death flushing is for fish and felt worse and all) and neither did the tanks but I couldn't tell that the dreams weren't real after being in bed for over 24 hours with the fever.

I called my ex-girlfriend for help and she brought tons of chicken soup and standard flu/fever medicine and I sent her away because I'd be dammed if someone was gonna catch what I had, it was awful. I took it but the next night was much worse, the fever was so bad it was hurting my joints. I would have gone to the hospital then (and mind you, it would be the first time in my life I ever decided to go so by now I was pretty scared and began tweeting that way) but I didn't think I could even reach my front door and instead of causing a huge scene with a break in and all I was gonna make it though the night and get help the next day.

Thing is, and this is where this is so weird, the next day I felt much much better. I got up looked at my face and was shocked about the "sunburn". I didn't even know that was possible. I didn't feel well enough to leave the house and I got up very early (from sleeping so much) so I decided to just call a taxi driver I knew to go get me the meds off my own self-diagnosis (and before anyone chides me about this I'm not stupid about this, and in my life I've been right about me more often than doctors have). By then I'd also developed swelling in my throat which was what was scaring me the most because it made me lose my appetite even more, made it harder to breathe (beyond the lung pain thing) and by now it had been a few days and I'd only eaten a couple pieces of bread and three spoonfuls of soup (I don't like chicken soup when I'm healthy, so it's like kicking a dog while he's down to me).

What I knew was that I had the flu, complicated by a lung infection (it was similar to one I had in the past), at least one ear infection (in the stupor I couldn't tell which one the fluid was coming from) and the jury was out on the sinuses (now I know they weren't due to the low levels of fluid). The throat thing was the part that stumped me, I put my finger down there as far as I could but I couldn't touch the swelling area. I know that some viruses can cause blisters in your throat and that was what I had initially ascribed it to.

So I had my own RX ready, and I wanted to just go ahead with a rather straightforward, if perhaps overdone, set of Oseltamivir to control the flu virus, any generic antibiotic to control the lung infection and prevent a complication like pneumonia, any generic antipyretic to prevent the fever from frying my brain, and something that the pharmacist recommended for my throat.

So the taxi guy came and went to my pharmacist (not the street one) and the pharmacist called me from there. I told him my order and he did his usual Q&A checks on me to make sure I knew what I was talking about. He asked me my symptoms, and questions about reactions blood pressure etc (all the contraindications for the medicine I was asking for. Basically what the doctor would do, except without the blood work and tests to rule out the much more serious stuff like septicemia. Thing is, by then it was clearly not that serious to me (septic shock is fatal more than half the time) so I was pretty confident about the treatment and the only question I had was about the throat so I described it because I didn't know what exactly to ask for other than that I wanted a buccal spray for topical treatment. The medicine came, and I realized he got it wrong by giving me a lidocaine spray which is for pain management in a sore throat and not exactly the problem I was trying to treat. I tried it anyway in case the inflammation could be helped by it but there really wasn't any pain there so I discarded that medicine.

Anyway, the antibiotics killed the stabbing chest pain, so that was one down, and the antipyretic kept the fever manageable (good thing too, cause there is a pile of clothes soaked in sweat near my bed that is almost as tall as me, as I was frantically changing out of my clothes drenched in sweat while burning and shivering in my body's confused effort to maintain homeostasis). I was already on the mend except for the throat which was getting worse. I knew I couldn't diagnose that but since I determined that the protuberance wasn't in my trachea I wasn't too worried (it would have to go absolutely nuts from the esophagus to cause asphyxiation and that was the only thing I was seriously worried about as it can happen too fast for me to react to if I am sleeping or too ill to get help when it hits). I woke up the next day feeling absolutely fine (except for the throat irritation) and got back to work. That afternoon I came down with the raging fever again and then in the evening it let up. Then it came back again hard enough for me to decide to go to the hospital if it didn't get better by the next day.

I tweeted that so my coworkers and friends would know what was up (one of my clients has a legitimate work emergency and wanted updates of my status so they could figure out if they needed to hire someone else to solve it) and said I'd go to the hospital the next day if I didn't get better. My tweets post to facebook, and I got an email back from squinney saying to go now (btw, I sometimes don't reply on facebook because from twitter there is no way to address the reply to your post and I'm lazy about logging into facebook) and thought it was actually a good idea. I'd have less activity in the hospital to deal with and after showering I felt like I could make a run for it. I called my ex-girlfriend and she left the party she was at and flew over with a taxi driver we both knew (who also dropped what she was doing to come get me, even dragging her girlfriend along who'd been out with her) and we went to the ER. On the way the fever was heating up and when we got there the folks freaked out. I was pale as paper and dripping sweat. They started running around me put me on a stretcher and ran me off to a room to start an IV and to draw blood etc. I told the doctor what I had and what I was treating it with and he said that he agreed with my self-medication (didn't even bother chiding me for it, so I liked this doc already) and said he might not have gone with the anti-viral I did and asked me why I chose it and when I told him my reasoning (it is because the UK NHS says it is the main treatment being used against H1N1 which is something I couldn't have ruled out without bloodwork) he laughed and told me swine flu isn't this bad and that I didn't have it and I told him that I also thought an anti-viral would be useful to prevent pneumonia as well and that made more sense to him. He then asked about allergies I might have. I have had allergic reactions only a couple times in my life and I have no idea what they were to so I didn't know what I might be allergic to. So we decided to add that to the IV and I waited a bit while they rushed the bloodwork. Then they ran me over to do xrays of my chest and throat and took me back to wait for them to come up with their conclusions (the earthquake happened during this part).

Funny thing is, by now I felt perfectly fine. Serious, the doctor didn't get it at all. I came in looking like death warmed over and at that point I felt nothing but a bit of irritation in my throat again. After they ruled out the real serious stuff we started talking about my throat and he diagnosed it as a swollen larynx from the generalized inflammation and added Ketoprofen (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that is also good for fever control) and Prednisone (which frankly is more risky than I would have gone, and I may curtail it if I continue to feel good but it is a corticosteroid that can help both with severe allergic reactions and inflammation and because we can't trial and error the allergy I agreed), lastly he prescribed me Fexofenadine (an antihistamine to double team on any allergy I might have to my medicine regimen) and told me to drop the oseltamavir due to contraindications with the drugs he was prescribing.

I was really cheery now both because I actually felt fine, as well as because I thought the doctor thinking it might be allergy (we can't be sure) is spot on, and I also liked knowing what was going on in my throat. The ex and I left in separate taxis then (she lives in a town across the capital from the town I live in and I still didn't want anyone spending too much time at my place with me) and on my way home I had my taxi guy do the drive through Taco Bell (hey, it was in the middle of the night then, only thing open was this and burger fast food so at least I could get a border bowl with some rice and ****) and I got home and ate my first meal in a few days. Felt just fine.

Today I woke up feeling pretty good but remembering yesterday have confined myself to bed to see if the afternoon/night relapse would happen. I had a bit of a cough in the afternoon and a slight temperature but that was it and though I will take it easy another day to play it safe I really do think I'm perfectly fine now and am feel a bit silly now for the dramatic tweets.

Oh one thing I forgot to mention is that I am squarely against universal healthcare insurance in America now. I don't just think it's a better idea to have an actual public health care option instead of public insurance but I no longer think public insurance is the next best thing. I think it is the worst possible thing that America can do.

Let me explain. Costa Rica has free public healthcare and a comparable life expectancy etc to the US. But those hospitals aren't comfortable or anything and they don't play the stupid US healthcare game of padding the bill with exotic tests and specialists they just get their job done for a lot less and their metrics show they aren't worse off for it.

But anyone who has a bit of money can go to private hospitals, and because I had bought insurance here (Americans might wanna stop reading here because it's like $600 a year for me) I opted for the best private hospital in the country. It's just like an American hospital with the same equipment and quality of doctors. Wanna know what my ER visit, bloodwork, doctor consultation and xrays cost me? Something like $230. The RX set me back another $50 and I almost laughed. I came in with thousands of dollars thinking I needed to be ready for the worst (from what I understand my insurance reimburses me but I need to pay) and that just blew my mind and make me sure I don't want a cent of our taxes going towards insurance in America's completely dysfunctional for-profit health care system.

I want public hospitals in every major city that are uncomfortable but do their job for free. And those who have money can get insurance and private care. And with that free option there those idiots in the health care system won't be able to get away with buying exotic machines and over recommending the use of them for their own profit or the insane infatuation with specialists American healthcare has.

Anyway, I'm perfectly fine now and this seems to really have just been a bunch of bad complications to a bad flu. Thanks all for the concern and well wishes but I've never been put in this spot before (having folks on the internet wishing me well for a flu makes me feel silly) so I'm gonna head on back to bed and beg off as being sickly or something now.

Lata.

welcome back, dude.

and I agree with you on the hospitals...

That sounds like a scary several days. For God's sake, don't go out until you're positive you're well, and ease back into things gradually.

yes, yes, to all that you've said, Robert.

But ... I vividly recall a recent response (to me, personally) where you said you'd never taken a holiday. Ever.

Then I recall another thread where you said you were looking at ways of reducing serious stress.

You don't think there might be some connection here?
Between over-work & getting seriously run down & ill, I mean?

Maybe your body is telling you something? (I say this, with the greatest of regard for your work & also with affection. )

You were a lucky son of a gun to be able to communicate with your doctor, who seemed to be super bright.

I'm not super bright, but have found my ability to communicate very useful in medical circumstances.

I'll just say health care is a mess and not go on, in this thread.


Good elaborated post.

Of course. Which is why I've pushed back hard at the work this week and told them to back off, but that actually stresses me more than work does. I genuinely like to work, especially when I pick work I love to do for fun. I push back against the extra a2k work like communication and stuff that I don't like. But the frenetic pace is the way I am.

This is really less about work than manic hyperactivity, I wanted to leave the hospital after the bloodwork because I had what I wanted out of the visit and was bored. Boredom is my kryptonite. I can't watch movies without reading a book at the same time, or programming, or surfing the web. That is why I don't watch TV, it's too passive and not interactive enough. My entertainment must by interactive and I must be entertained every waking minute or I want to die.

This is not just a lifestyle choice, this is my insanity that I always struggle with. Frenetic, disjointed hyperactivity. I self-medicate it with weed (as opposed to what a doctor would recommend for it) because that slows me down a wee bit and I found the cure for me and must just fight my nature as best as I can.

To say it in Poe: You referred the insanity to the work rather than the work to the insanity.

Thanks Rob. Good to know what on earth happened.

I was really scared you had fried your brain when I read about skin peeling off!!! You sound normal.

What a pity the work peak demands had to coincide with this.

Erm....you don't think a LITTLE bit of speed, and something to help you sleep, might give you a wee break from all of that? You said ages ago that speed made you feel less manic.

You mean when I told you I used to take big doses of mini-thins as a teen? Those had ephedrine which is the closest thing I can think of that I might have said that about but it would chill me out by suppressing my appetite (when I was homeless this was useful) more than anything else.

It was like $5 a bottle over the counter in any gas station back then, and that with a never-ending glass of sprite (it seemed to need sugar to kick in as well) at Denny's was cheaper than food or other chemical entertainment. It would just give me a bit of a relaxed buzz but didn't help with sleep, just chilling the hell out a bit and passing the time. Hell any drug would help with that, but I don't think it's what I need because I have a very addictive personality.

Anyway, this is all sorts of personal and feeling like another doctor visit so I head out for real now.

Well I hope "they" lay off, Robert.



I can sort of understand that, Robert.
Boredom is dead, crap time.
Boredom is negative time.
I so relate to that. But, you know, there's only so much you can do to to negate the negativity & boredom that constantly surrounds you. I know, I know, I know ... but I also know your problem with coping with the boredom that surrounds is so much more pressing than mine.

But, you know, some times it means learning, forcing yourself, even, to take time out. Not an easy thing, I know for sure, if you are a sort of driven person.

But sometimes the self-forced time out (as difficult as it is) can cause you to think, re-avaluate, make a few changes. Painful stuff, I acknowledge.

But you'll never know, unless you actually try it. It might well mean faces your demons, but you've face some pretty crappy stuff already in your life, yes?

The thing is, sooner or later you're going to have to deal with these things. You reach the point (I know) where you have no choice but to do it.

Anyway, Robert, I'm wishing you all the best. Whatever way you go. I mean that.

wow, quite the ordeal!
glad it doesn't appear to be anything more serious...

I don't think it's something I can completely cure, this is a personality disorder, it isn't a lifestyle choice. I can either take serious drugs or just fight it as best as I can, and that is what I do.

I am dealing with it, every single day. Trying to concentrate is most of my effort in every single day and I don't want the hard drug solutions. I can do better about balance I'm sure, and yes I actually kind of thrive on stress because it isn't boring and while that isn't good for me physically at all I value my mental health more than my physical health and I sometimes feel more stressed relaxing than I am relaxed when I'm stressed. I don't forget much and I have a lot of ideas and stuff to do on my list so it's constantly in my mind and my life is a fight to "get that off my radar" and when I do nothing it causes me serious anxiety because I can't get rid of the radar (and because relaxing causes more ideas which adds to the radar). It's hard to describe, I know I'm stressed and can feel it physically but it feels good to me it makes me feel alive to have tons of pressure and challenges.

I know I'm burning the candle at both ends and have no illusions about what that means, but I get pretty crazy when it's only got one little itty bitty flame, you know. And for the most part I'm pretty robust and healthy, I haven't been sick like this since I was a kid with childhood diseases.