OK...so about three weeks ago I made a little trip to my local emergency room at the behest of my wife. I had what I could only describe as a severe migraine. To my knowledge I have never had a migraine before so when it did not go away after two days I figured something might be wrong.
Just to give you some background on myself. I rarely, if ever get sick. I have never broken a bone or needed stitches. Short of being born I have never spent more than a few hours in a hospital. I have been living in the same place for 5 years now and until recently settled on a primary care physician. It's not that I don't care about my health I just don't think I am vulnerable. Boy was I wrong.
So, I am in the ER and the doctor orders a "LP" or commonly known as a Spinal Tap. This is the only way to test for Meningitis. It sounds scarier than it is. They make you sit up and hunch your back over. The area is numbed with lidocaine which hurts like hell but for only a few seconds. In fact the LP was over so fast I was not aware the needle was in my back. The doctor warned me about this "spinal headache" and so did the nurse. He explained it would be worse than the pain I was already in from the meningitis...I told him I doubted that as the pain was already at a 10. Hospitals use this 1-10 scale to rate pain, I became very used to this routine as this let the nurses know when to give me my morphine. BTW!!! WOW!!! That shit is crazy. The first time the nurse feed it into my IV I was like, 'what is that?" She said "morphine", like it was nothing. I was in so much pain that I didn't care what they put in me. A tingle shot through my entire body, the pain faded but my chest felt like it was collapsing and made me cough for air. This turned into just a mellow overall feeling of euphoria that lasted about three hours. To my disappointment the nurse could not give me more until four hours had elapsed. Which meant I had to feel the head pain again for about a half an hour. This pain was so bad that when they transferred me and I didn't have the morphine, it made me vomit. Fun, right?
So the doc confirmed that I did indeed have viral meningitis which can be very bad if untreated. I was given a good dose of antibiotics and fluids to cure me. After being admitted on late Wednesday, missing a wedding I was supposed to attend in Wichita, I was released on Sat afternoon. I can no longer claim to be a super human that is invulnerable to ailments. Bummer.
With a weeks worth of pain meds in hand I returned home and to work the following Monday. Upon leaving the hospital the doc said the head pains should be gone in about a week. HUH. I wish. In fact as I write this three weeks later I am still in a bit of discomfort. So the week I returned to work was going okay until Thursday. I came in, started to feel a strong headache come on and then some nausea. I promptly headed home and laid down for a couple of hours. I returned to work once I felt better and stuck it out. I tried again on Friday only this time I managed to vomit on a laptop I was working on. This time I could not quite recover from this by taking a nap. I figured out that if i sat up or stood for more than 15 minutes a t a time I would get head pain and nausea. This is what is known as a "Spinal Headache".
I made an appointment with a doctor since the pain did not go away over the weekend. On my way to the appointment my wife mentioned that she heard from someone at work that this is common when having an LP or an epidural. Apparently the site of the puncture can take a while to heal and cause these symptom due to a leaking of spinal fluids. This can be remedied by preforming a blood patch. We mentioned this to the doctor which he dismissed since he though it was not likely. He ordered more useless expensive tests that came back negative. The doc suggested I see a neurologist, which could not see me for another couple of weeks. This was maddening considering i was burning through my paid time off just laying on my back. Not my idea of a good use of vacation time. My wife and I became very familiar with the nurses at the hospital since we were calling every few hours for some answers. We brought up the blood patch as an option that we self diagnosed and thankfully a nurse felt my pain. She put me in contacted with an anesthesiologist. Hallelujah! He said I was not a candidate for a blood patch...DOH...but with some pain meds, fluids and lots of caffeine I would be able to return to the living.
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