Sunday was pretty much a case of steady as she goes.
So was Monday until about  5pm, then things got a bit hectic.
First I lost my lunch, then my temperature spiked, which means it's likely that I had picked up an infection. The usual procedure when this happens is for a heap of blood and various swabs to be taken for testing in the pathology lab. While the nurse was in the middle of trying to take blood I start shivering like crazy and generally started to feel like crap, hmmm, definitely something going on here. I was placed under an aluminium blanket with a heap of normal blankets on top, I'm not sure if the aluminium blanket was meant to raise my body temperature or to hide me from alien abduction, either way I felt like a giant twisties packet.
Broad spectrum antibiotics were started and, after a while my temperature started to come back down and stabilise at normal levels.
When things had settled down I was given three bags of red blood cells as my levels had drop below a safe level (you can see the rise in my haemoglobin in the graph below). The blood transfusion was the last thing that went to plan for a while.
I think it was about 10 pm during a routine observation (obs) that the nurse discovered that my temperature had spiked again but this time my blood pressure was low enough and my heart rate was high enough for the medical emergency team (MET) to be called in. Much hooking up to machines, questioning, poking, prodding, insertion of cannula's and removal of blood followed, this in turn was followed by various medications and an infusion of albumen to raise my blood pressure. Things settled down again, machines were disconnected, the MET drifted away and I was placed on 15 minute obs to ensure any further problems get picked up straight away, and to ensure that I would get no sleep and my nurse would be rushed of her feet. The whole process took about one and a half hours.
About 3am it when the whole episode happened all over again almost exactly like the first, but this time a trip to intensive care was on the cards, fortunately things were resolved before that occurred.
It was 5am by the time it was all over and neither my roommates or myself had gotten any sleep (except for the idiot in the corner who has continuous, inane conversations with his sister on speaker phone all day, shouts at the football on a tv that does have a volume control and an off switch but you wouldn't know it, and likes to call the nurses 'luv'. The prick managed to snore through the whole thing.)
On Tuesday morning I was given a platelet transfusion, again you can see the result on the graph below.
I have had several platelet transfusions in the past with no problems, but it just wasn't to be my day, this time I had an allergic reaction. My face went puffy, turned bright red, I broke out in hives, had shortness of breath, and I got the shivers again. Another cocktail of medications followed and, again, things were resolved. I might be having some problems but it's nice to be in the hands of people who clearly know what they are doing.
I spent the rest of the day trying to get some sleep, which is something that can be hard to come by in hospitals at the best of times, it's pretty much impossible during the day no matter how tired you get, especially in multi bed rooms.
Late in the day I was told that I would be going to a single room because they had identified the infection that was giving me such bad diarrhea, colostridium difficile, or cdiff for short. One of the quirks of cdiff is that if it is present in the gut it is usually kept in check by the other bacteria in the gut, but if a person is given a broad spectrum oral antibiotic all the bacteria keeping cdiff in check is killed of but cdiff isn't because it needs a targeted antibiotic, this allows cdiff to run rampant. Which it is definitely doing, shitting through the eye of a needle is easy, give me a real challenge!
Today was a much better day, the docs are impressed with how well I have bounced back from such a rough day, which goes to prove that tomorrow is indeed another day, who knows what it may bring for any of us. Hope your tomorrow is great.
Cheers, Pete.