My new year started off with a bang to say the least! I went to my LLMD at the beginning of
January and found out that I would have ANOTHER round of Tigecycline. I was able to do Tigecycline before but
I was exhausted and nauseous, in addition to every Lyme symptom being
exacerbated. That round was doable
because I was home and I could rest and do nothing at all for days at a time if
that was what I needed, that’s what winter break is for a college student anyways!
Before I was even able to begin this next round of intense
IV treatment and oral antibiotic treatment, I began to feel very sick. If this was a Herxheimer reaction, this
was one I had never felt before.
It was Martin Luther King Monday; I woke up with a fever so high that I
couldn’t get out of bed. I had
texted two of my three roommates just waiting for them to wake up to devise a
plan. By the time my roommate
Megan had woken up, I told her I had to get to the hospital. I was very thankful that my other
roommate Jackie took me to the hospital and waited with me all day until I was
able to be seen by a doctor and had the appropriate test ran to figure out what
was going on.
By this time the doctor had decided to pull my PICC line,
because my fever was 104.3 and told me I would be staying overnight to be
monitored. I was in complete panic
mode. I was not ready to have my
PICC line pulled, I still had another round of IV treatment left, was my thought
process. That first night my blood
pressure dropped to low 70’s/over low 30’s, scary experience to say the
least; ironically it did that the second night as well. I had to stay in the
hospital for three nights, four days. They
did culture the tip of my PICC line and found out that I had a gram-negative
rod, so the consensus was that I had sepsis based on a few of my other symptoms
as well! I was given Vancomycin every 8 hours and then Rocephin twice a day. When I was discharged I was instructed to take Cipro twice a day for 10 days.
Sepsis, septic shock, gram negative rods, picc lines --> These were words I
never thought I would know the meanings of, but now they are part of my
vocabulary. In some ways I feel
like I was robbed of part of my innocence by having to deal with such uncertainty
and illness at such a young age.
Then on the other hand I am much more mature then a lot of my friends
and I do attribute that to my illness because I never would have had that
driving force to grow up until many years later.
I thought I was done with my IV antibiotic therapy since my
PICC line was out, but my doctor had decided to put one back in after I finished
my sepsis antibiotic treatment. SO
I am not without a PICC currently.
I did just finish my Tigecycline round that I was supposed to start
January 27th; I started it February 3rd and just finished
my CoArtem on Wednesday. Now I am
just trying to detox; I am experiencing some of the most pain I have
experienced in awhile including nerve pain in my back/neck, frontal headaches,
swollen glands, cognitive confusion, word retrieval issues, and more. But I know I will get through this,
plus I now have something to look forward to, I am going to Florida for spring
break!
“Take vacations—go as many places as you can—you can always
make money, you can’t always make memories.”
