EDIT: Oh wow, thank you guys so much for the outpouring of well-wishes. You guys are the best <3


Well that was probably the worst three days of my life.

Savin here. As you might have picked up if you read our twitter feed, I was sent to the E.R. on Tuesday night. I am home now, in stable condition (though not what my doctors would call “good”). Will probably be taking the rest of the week off to recover, but honestly I feel more or less fine and should be back in working order in a couple days.

For those interested in likely boner-wilting details, read on after the break. Everybody has been asking, so I might as well write up a response in one place. Otherwise, see you guys next week.

 

After work on Tuesday I got a call from my usual doctor, who I’d seen during the week for a medication re-up and routine bloodwork (my cholesterol is fine, yay). She effectively screamed at me to get my piggy ass to the E.R., as my hemoglobin count (that thing in your blood what carries oxygen) was less than half of what a normal person’s was. And, it turns out, falling. I arrived around 9:00 at night, and was ordered a transfusion to counteract whatever was apparently draining my blood — be it internal bleeding or a deeper cause. However, I was left sitting in the E.R., and then the attached hospital, for over 12 hours without seeing an actual doctor or getting that transfusion. Nobody could or would tell me anything. Proper fucking scary, let me tell you. The weird thing was, though, that I felt fine — felt fine going in, feel fine now. I never would have known anything was amiss if my doctor hadn’t caught it in my blood work.

After about 18 hours and several dozen blood drains by the nurses (desperately trying to find me a match for a transfusion — they kept saying something about unique antibodies or some such), I got righteously pissed about the lack of getting a God-damn doctor to talk to me. Luckily for me, my uncle is a hematologist-oncologist, which is to say the exact kind of doctor I needed… just a state over. I was able to brow beat the nurses into faxing him my labs and brought him in as a consultant. Consultant of “get on the phone and yell at the doctor I was supposed to meet until he actually showed up,” apparently, because that sure got the ball rolling. Also cancelled my transfusion while he was at it, because that would be just a stopgap measure against what appeared to be a deeper problem.

Over the next couple days, they insisted on keeping me confined and monitored after several false starts towards release. After briefly stabilizing, my hemoglobin level continued to plummet into the “life threatening” level. During this time, despite suffering from extreme anemia, I was tapped for over thirty vials of blood — my arms are giant bruises, and by the end they needed to bring in a sonogram specialist just to find working veins they could poke at. I got next to no sleep, probably 8 hours or less since Tuesday morning. I was in pretty extreme pain from the dozens of veins being damaged and the least comfortable living arrangement possible, exhausted from sleep deprivation, and frankly pretty terrified after days of nobody telling me anything and being in critical condition.

And yet, this morning… my hemoglobin levels were dramatically on the rise. Better than they were when I first came in. For absolutely no reason: the doctors did nothing positive for three days, and I appear to have begun recovering on my own. I still do not know what the fuck is wrong with me, if this is a deeper issue or just some kind of freak anomaly, but I’m going to be seeing professionals for a bit to work out whatever the heck’s going on. Hopefully I’ll be able to transfer my primary care over to my uncle, as he’s actually semi-competent unlike the twat waffle they assigned me here, but that will probably be extraordinarily inconvenient unless I can just Skype him in a professional capacity. I absolutely do not ever want to deal with the Tennessee medical system ever, ever again if it can be avoided.

Given my complete lack of symptoms throughout, my sudden reversal, and the very obvious physical and mental stress I was in, both hematologists agreed to release me tonight. So I’m back in my own bed, safe and sound, but I’ve got no idea why that happened or if it will again. That’s pretty spooky, but as long as I remain asymptomatic… meh, I guess? Outside of the damage the hospital did to me, I’m pretty much fine and seem to be recovering.

So yeah, that was my week. I’m gonna go sleep like the dead tonight and then forget any of this ever happened post-haste. Take care of yourselves, and go get your cancer screenings and bloodwork done if you’re behind. As incredibly annoying as this all was, I’m glad someone caught it before I just face-planted into my keyboard and died out of nowhere some day in the future.

Savin out. See you next week.