Lyme Awareness Month aka Medical Madness Month. Day 1.

I wanted to do something different for this year’s Lyme awareness month. So I decided to share one doctor experience on each day of this month.

I’ve already missed day 1. but I’ll stick 1 and 2 together and keep going from there. I have enough Doctor tales to fill the entire month. Sad isn’t it? And most of them will be horrible stories. Although a few are okay.

In the beginning of December, 2011, life was good. I had 3 happy healthy kids (then 8. 11, and 14) and I was only a few weeks away from graduating from college and being a NY state certified Early Childhood Educator. Something I’d been working for a long time.

Student teaching is very stressful. And the rules are quite strict. You can’t miss student teaching for anything. No excuses. So when I woke up on December 4th. I didn’t feel well. But I thought I could manage. And I didn’t want to ruin my years of hard work to get to this point. I went to school, despite feeling horrible.

My classroom teachers could see I didn’t feel well. And they sent me home early that day, where I collapsed in bed in horrible pain, and alternating between sweating and freezing. I also had horrific pain in my head and neck, my lower back, and lesser pain in all my muscles and joints. These symptoms quickly progressed and I added nausea and inability to keep even water down to the list of symptoms. I was weak, as if I’d just climbed Everest. The bathroom was adjacent to my bedroom, but I could barely even crawl there to use the toilet. I would sweat, and then I would freeze. My teeth chattered. My head pounded and felt like it would explode.

This continued for a couple of days. I was sure I was dying. I had never been so sick before. I had an idea what was causing this, as a little more than a year ago, I had moved, just 10 minutes from where I’d grown up. But, since moving there, I’d been incessantly bitten by ticks. While I was sleeping. I’d check before bed. No ticks. I’d wake up with one or sometimes multiple ticks stuck to me in the morning.

So when I didn’t feel better, I went to urgent care. I chose this because my general practitioner had recently left private practice and I hadn’t found a Replacement yet. they actually did a decent job. They told me they didn’t know what was wrong, but it seemed like some sort of viral infection. They drew quite a bit of blood and sent me home to rest, try to drink fluids and suggested I take ibuprofen.

I have, many years after, obtained the records. They properly noted all my symptoms. (Change in appetite, chills, fatigue, fever, sweats, headache, lightheadedness, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting. Muscle pain, and body aches. ) Here’s a screenshot of some abnormal things they found.

The next day, they got the blood work back, and they called and said that my white cells and platelets were “alarmingly” high. They wanted to know how quickly I could get a ride to my nearest ER. My husband was out of town for work, so I called my Mom for a ride.

I now know my white blood cell count was 22.5, marked with the abbreviation: CH (Critical High, Clearly high? crazy high?) as well as several other abnormal values.

Urgent Care faxed these labs and visit notes to the triage nurse at My local hospital while my mother drove me there. she drove like a crazy woman. That story will be next.