Poison In the Blood

Until recently, I thought the most life-threatening experience I’d ever been through was having the flu with asthma. My asthma manifests as coughing – insane coughing – and the night I lost all my breath and could barely tell 911 what I needed, I honestly thought there was a real risk I could lose my life. Suffocate to death.

I was hospitalized for three days, and then contracted an antibiotic-resistant sinus infection that required surgery to drain. This was in 2019 – and it put the fear of God into me about COVID.

Whenever I catch a cold, as someone with asthma, I need to go on steroids immediately. So on June 13th, coming back from a performance of Proof and feeling ebullient, when I felt the kind of burn in the back of my throat and the nasal drip, I hopped on prednisone right away.

I didn’t think much of it, honestly. There were a few days where we had air quality alerts, for which I have a dispensation for commuting (again, thanks to asthma). Things felt fairly normal, until the following Tuesday.

On Monday night, June 22, I was still feeling cold-y. But the next day I had a work commitment – my boss was coming down from Hartford, we were going to man a table at an internal tech event. I was running between buildings in Newark, and my cough was getting worse and worse. At the end of the day, I begged off to go home. And then I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water.

The next day, Wednesday, I called out sick. I was going to try to go to my regular doctor’s, but my friend Mary insisted on taking me to urgent care. Ugliness and effluvia commenced. I was sent to the ER – Mary drove me to the ER. And I was admitted. I had a fever of 103. I was vomiting up egg-yolk-colored infection. I couldn’t eat, I could barely sip water.

Community-acquired (as opposed to hospital-acquired) Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia is, on paper, fucking terrifying. There’s only a 1-3% chance of the average person contracting it in the wild. There is a 25-30% mortality rate. There are no lifestyle reasons, no preventative measures – it just happens.

Once admitted, I was put on an IV of vancomycin. Normally, that’s the treatment reserved for MRSA, probably the most terrifying infection of all. But I am allergic to antibiotics for non-MRSA infections, so it’s a blitzkrieg no matter what.

I was in the hospital for 9 days and 8 nights.

Hospitals are not restful. Certainly there are techs and nurses and doctors coming around at all hours, drawing blood or doing vital sign checks or giving respiratory treatments. In addition, this specific hospital was having windows reinforced in case of hurricanes – and that process started (it sounded like drilling) at 6:30 a.m. every day.

I was lucky in my assignment of a roommate – an abuela who loves soccer and the World Cup. Her family paid for the TV, which I watched out of the corner of my eye, and we had a few friendly rivalries. I was also lucky when it came to the nurses (heroes, every single one) and techs and residents. I felt incredibly well-cared-for, even amidst the complete chaos that is any hospital in a major city center. I was further lucky in that my boss – a veteran – was and is utterly understanding.

I was discharged today, and a visiting nurse came a couple hours later. I have a home IV set-up – 25 days of vancomycin bags, so I’ll be working from home as I heal. There’s a lot I have to do now – being in bed for 9 days straight means you have no muscles anymore – and I intend to be religious about it.

The life-threatening-ness still hasn’t sunk in yet. The staph filtered out of my lungs (it was in 3 different places in my lungs) into my bloodstream – technically, bacteremia. That part’s been killed for now, but the antibiotics are necessary to make sure it’s permanently dead.

In the meantime, I’m so grateful to be home. To be in control of what I’m watching, listening to – not having autonomy is the worst part about being in an institution of any kind. When I landed, I just put classical radio on for two hours until I felt like I had my legs underneath me again.

So yes, the worst part about this is the utter lack of control. Of cause. There was nothing I could do to stop this from happening. But it also wasn’t inevitable! It’s just…one of those things.