– In which Dorn talks about his ailments.
hile I was negotiating a serious Mystery Illness this summer, several people suggested that I should write a blog post about my experience. I hesitated, because I struggled with finding a way to do so that didn’t come off as just an old guy talking about his ailments. Maybe I’ve found a way now. I’ve organized my story into four vignettes, each involving a trip to the emergency room.
ER VISIT 1. In the summer of 1999, Kathleen and I had just bought our current house, and hadn’t moved in yet. It was someone’s old summer fishing house, but we planned eventually to live in it full time. When Hurricane Floyd threatened the Chesapeake Bay, we were determined to defend our new castle from the elements.
The hurricane was miles offshore, but we got plenty of wind and rain. I was on attic detail, emptying the pots and pans we had collecting water from dozens of leaks in the roof, when I took a wrong step, between the rafters, and crashed into the dining room below. I was scraped, cut, bruised and contused, and Kathleen had to drive me through the storm to the local emergency room.
They washed up my cuts, x-rayed me for breaks, gave me some painkillers and told me I could go home. “You’re lucky you didn’t break any ribs!”, the ER doc smiled. “Er, doctor, aren’t that and that broken ribs?” asked Kathleen, pointing to my x-ray.
“Good catch!” he said. “They are! Yeah, you have some broken ribs there. They’ll hurt! Bye!”
I felt I had to speak up. “Er, excuse me, I’m no doctor, but shouldn’t you give me a tetanus shot before I go? I fell through a 50-year-old ceiling and got pretty cut up.” He agreed. “Great idea! Let’s do that!”
This was Calvert County in a nutshell. After years of working in DC, and living in a DC bedroom community, one of the things I loved best was the more laid-back pace of life further south. But now I was on notice that that same easy attitude could be found in the local medical care. Uh-oh!
I finally got my fill of laissez-faire doctoring with an ER visit about a decade later.
ER VISIT 2. I settled into the life of a long-distance commuter and weekend Country Gentleman. My GP was Dr A—, who personified the easygoing country doctor. This was okay with me because I was young-ish (I was still in my Second Age), and relatively invulnerable.
One afternoon I suddenly started feeling like I was developing a bad flu. My temperature shot up to a value I hadn’t seen since I was a kid (with a lot less body mass to heat up), and red blotchy spots started to appear on my feet. So I bopped over to Dr A—. He said to take some aspirin, and let’s see how you feel in the morning. After he left and the nurse was drawing blood, I noticed a note the doc had written to himself and left behind. It said simply “RMSF?“. What was he thinking?
So of course, as soon as I got home, I googled Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It turns out that the tick-borne disease does occur in Maryland, and has my exact symptoms: headache, high fever and red blotchy spots that start at the feet and slowly spread up the body. It also said that the disease is not fatal if you start treatment quickly enough, within a few hours of first symptoms. There is a definitive test for R.M.S.F., but if you wait for the results, you’ve already waited too long. Yikes!
My fever wasn’t going down, and the spots were indeed starting to move up my legs, so I rushed to the ER, and told them I was worried maybe I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. They said yes, maybe you do, and admitted me to the hospital. I ended up spending several weeks there. And even though the test ultimately came back negative for R.M.S.F., I resolved that once I got out, I would fire Dr A—’s complacent ass, and find me a doctor who could muster up a little more enthusiasm for keeping me alive.
I found one too, and he’s my GP to this day. He was my GP when, about a decade later, the Mystery Illness that I’m still dealing with now first sent me to the ER.
The story is concluded… here!
Thanks,
Dorn
9/9/2019