To the hospital!

L has had a sore throat all week, with a low-grade ear-infection-feeling thingy to go along.  She dismissed it, thinking it was her normal cedar fever that she always has this time of year.  Wednesday the throat and ear worsened, to the point she got very little sleep.

Through last night the sore throat got a LOT worse, so bad that it was visibly painful for her to swallow.  Along with this, she started feeling like her salivary glands were producing a lot more than usual.  Those added up to no sleep at all on Thursday.

This morning she didn’t even try to go to work.  I took M to school and went on to the Empire, about 45 minutes late.

L called me in the middle of the morning and left a message:  “This isn’t getting better and it may be worse.”  (By now it hurt her so to open her mouth that she was mumbling and slurring her words as though drunk.)  “I called Dr. V. and I have an appointment with his physician assistant at 3:15.  Please come get me and take me to his office.”

I came home and got her, and she was right that she needed to be taken.  Eyes drooping, shuffling gait, wobbly, very very VERY obviously unwell.  For a mercy, the PA ran almost to time and we were shown back to the examining room quite soon.  L’s vitals didn’t seem far off:  BP 124/78 (a little high on systolic for her), temp 99.9, lungs clear.  When asked about what was hurting and where and how, L said ”The very best place I can imagine being right now is in a hospital bed with a shot of Demerol to knock me out so I can forget how much this hurts, a course of antibiotics, and one of those little dentist’s oral vacuums to keep me from drowning in my own spit.”  (This was significant; if she talks about going into hospital without being prompted, she feels bad indeed.)  The PA tried to get her mouth open to do a throat exam, but the most L could manage was about half an inch, which didn’t give much scope for an exam.  The best the PA could see was that her left tonsil appeared to be tremendously swollen and abscessed, and the right one might be infected as well; she called in the doctor to look, and he agreed that what little he could see was disturbing.  He said had it not been Friday, he might have given her an injectable antibiotic and sent her home with instructions to come back the next day, but as it was Friday and the weekend was on us, and in light of L’s continuing compromised immune system (her white-cell counts are back around 2,200 per cubic millimeter when they should be above 4,000), he thought it best to admit her to the hospital for the weekend and start her on IV antibiotics.  While his staff was arranging all that, I walked the five blocks from the hospital to M’s school and got her, then came back to find her already swept up and installed in a room on Five West at Saint David’s.  M and I stayed a few minutes to see her settled, then went home.  We couldn’t do any more, and she certainly wasn’t encouraging any company—all she wanted to do was sleep, for a night and a day if she could.

I’m re-arranging my weekend to take M to a classmate’s birthday party tomorrow, which L would normally have covered.  I have no idea what this is going to do to our already precarious finances, but it can’t be good.  January was looking like a bad enough month already, and now this.

The Gnomes of Zurich rubber-cement some peppermints in the jonquil bed.  Fnord.