Patient Zero of the Zombie Apocalypse

Yes­ter­day I had a colonoscopy, and I got cheated and then I got more than I bar­gained for.

The last time I had one of these pup­pies, the 4 to 5 hours of trippy liq­uid­ness post pro­ce­dure almost made up for the crappy (fig­u­ra­tively and lit­er­ally) prepa­ra­tion. But this time they had a new way of putting you to sleep, it is very fast act­ing and very fast in clear­ing your sys­tem. When I woke up in the recov­ery room I was as alert as I was when sit­ting in the wait­ing room before­hand. What a let down.

We went home I had lunch and then I got in bed to catch a nap. I never did get any shut-eye, about 45 min­utes of toss­ing and turn­ing I started to get cold, real cold. I started shak­ing and couldn’t get warm. Donna took my tem­per­a­ture and it read 96.9. She filled the bath­tub with hot water, no cold used at all, and I bet that the water tem­per­a­ture was about 110°. It took almost 3/4 of an hour in the tub before the shak­ing stopped. I stayed in the water about fif­teen min­utes more and when I exited the bath I looked like a cooked lob­ster. After that my tem­per­a­ture was now read­ing 103.

I stayed feel­ing warm the rest of the after­noon and when I still didn’t feel right about 6:00PM we took my temp again and it still read one hun­dred and three! I took an extra strength Tylenol, drank a cold soda, ate some cold jello and after an hour my tem­per­a­ture had “dropped” down to 102.6°

Next stop was the emer­gency room. They took my tem­per­a­ture and of course it read 99.1°. Debated going home, but opted to stay and get checked out more thor­oughly. The ER doc­tor ordered chest and abdom­i­nal x-rays, look­ing for clues. He had sev­eral vials of blood drawn for lab work along with a urine sam­ple. He also had the nurse fill 3 bot­tles about the size of some­thing from a mini bar with blood that were for cul­tur­ing. While we waited for lab results I got a lit­ter of saline in my IV.

The hot bath, the ER visit, the stay­ing at the ER and the ER doc’s test­ing were all done with con­sul­ta­tion with the doc­tor who did my scope.

No one was sure exactly what was going on with me as these we atyp­i­cal of what to expect after this pro­ce­dure. I was in no pain, I just got the chills real bad and then went into the over­heat range. The X-rays were fine, no bowel per­fo­ra­tions and no fluid in my lungs. Urine was fine. My blood work did show that my white blood count was at 18k, with 10–12 being nor­mal. I obvi­ously had infec­tion of some kind, but no one knew what kind. I either had a sim­ple bug picked up from some­where and it was unre­lated to the pro­ce­dure or it was related and could get much worse, plus they wouldn’t know about the blood cul­tures until 12 hours or so later, they wanted to keep me overnight.

We balked at this, I was feel­ing fine. The ER doc called my pri­mary care physi­cian and after a few min­utes the poor schmoe who was on call came in and exam­ined me, he finally agreed to let me go home if I let him admin­is­ter the first doses of two dif­fer­ent antibi­otics right there (plus give me pre­scrip­tions for fill­ing later.) One was a pill, but the other one took 90 min­utes to drip into me via IV. We finally left the ER at 1:30AM this morning.

I have to give a blood sam­ple tomor­row, then see the PCP on Fri­day and see if my white blood cell count comes down. Of course we are still wait­ing to see if one of those blood cul­tures goes mutant, and I become Patient Zero of the Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse.