What. A. Week.

Three visits to the hospital, two MRIs, one EKG, and a partridge in a pear tree.

How timely that I decided to re-start doing diary-style posts here at the precise time that I had a week for the ages. (I’m mildly delirious and heavily medicated, so it should be exciting proofreading this in a couple of days.)

So, I do wound myself quite a lot — my wrists and fingers, for example, are absolutely coated with scars from various cooking and pet-related incidents. I have permanent lumps on my shins from repeatedly walking into children’s stepstools in the dark. I’ve been in car accidents, motorcycle accidents, playground accidents — I once even fell off a curb directly outside of a hospital emergency room (because I wasn’t looking where I was going), which was painful, albeit convenient.

But I don’t usually have medical incidents pop up out of absolutely nowhere; I’ve always considered my body a bit of a tank that way.

Turns out? Aging is a bitch, my friends. Because these incidents apparently pop up out of nowhere these days. (Don’t get me started on what’s happening to my hormones.)

A few days ago, I woke up with an elbow so painful and misshapen (I’ll spare you the photo; it’s super gross) that it was obviously an urgent care situation. They gave me some antibiotics and sent me home…but if the incident linked below taught me anything, it’s that an urgent care trip during which they barely even glance at you isn’t necessarily medical gospel — and if you don’t advocate for yourself, things can get very bad, very fast.

I Had A Misdiagnosed Ectopic Pregnancy

Anyway, my arm got worse over the next day or two and I became feverish, at which point I went to the ER. I overheard the admitting nurse saying something like “sepsis alert,” which led me to google “sepsis,” which led me to discover that it’s really quite bad: An infection of the blood that, left untreated, can lead to extreme inflammation and multiple organ failure. (Usually it’s from a wound or repeated activity, but…I don’t know. Mine isn’t…?)

They saw me immediately, which is how you know it’s not great. But apparently the infection didn’t reach the level of septic shock, so my organs appear to be functioning on their own for the time being. And I’m on a lot of medications (as mentioned), so presumably on the mend.

It wasn’t just my illness that made this week horrible, though. Without going too much into it, a very close friend of mine lost someone extremely close to her in a traumatic and sudden way — and the pain in her voice left me spinning; there’s some types of pain I can’t imagine leave you able to put one foot in front of the next. And my friend’s experience combined with a serious medical event…I mean, I walked into the ER absolutely shaking.

I felt mortal. And terrified.

This isn’t a fun story, and I don’t have a great resolution — I’m still pretty ill, and I’ll never stop being heartbroken for my friend — but, of course, it’s (once again) jarringly lovely to realize that when I really need help, there are people there who actively want to step in. I forget this constantly, and it’s a shame that it takes an emergency to remind me, but one of these days maybe I’ll look up and see all the people around me, and realize that they’re just there — no emergency required.