Plot Twist

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 27^th; I started it February 3^rd 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.”