Hospital Visit

It all started Monday morning. I wasn’t feeling very hungry so I just ate a little Wheat Chex cereal. I had some leftover, so I took it for lunch with my PB&J sandwich. At staff worship I was feeling kind of blah, but it didn’t seem too odd. As my morning classes went on, though, I felt worse and worse. I finally made it to lunch and went home so that I could try to take a nap. After being unsuccessful, I went back to the school. I still had about 40 minutes left because I have a free period after lunch. I just sat in the teachers’ workroom and stared at the wall. I ate the rest of my cereal, even though I wasn’t hungry at all. I went to my last two afternoon classes and felt really exhausted. I did some teaching in Algebra 1 and I was trying to walk around the classroom to help students, but I was getting so tired. For music class I was going to play some examples on the electric keyboard, but the plug-ins weren’t working and when I finally tried one that worked, I was too frustrated to play anymore and so I had the students copy the information on the board. After the class was over I went down to the library to talk to Mama Rose about not feeling well. She told me to just go home and sleep. I got my things and went home, took a shower, and tried to sleep. I kept tossing and turning but I think I fell asleep. Around 5 pm Megan made supper for the other girls. They offered me some, but I still did not feel like eating. I tried to keep sleeping and drinking some water. I was feeling very warm in my bed and the thought finally occurred to me (after seeing Megan bundled up in jacket and pants from cold sweats) that I might have had a fever all day. The girls turned off the AC so Megan wouldn’t be cold, but I was burning up. I took some ibuprofen and that seemed to help break the fever, but I still felt really warm. I got up for a while and sat in the “living/dining room”. I was mostly staring at the cabinet island in the middle of the room. I finally went back to bed.
Around midnight, the vomiting began. Midnight, 1 AM, and close to 6 AM I got up to go to the bathroom. I had pretty much nothing in my stomach except for activated charcoal (disgusting coming up…). They had told Megan and I that if we didn’t feel good in the morning, they would find someone to take over our classes. Obviously, we weren’t going to school. Mama Rose came to our apartment and told us that she was taking us to the hospital. We weren’t too excited, but we packed up some things and got ready to go. Megan went out to the taxi first, but I started to feel like vomiting again. Fortunately, that was the last time I vomited. When we got to the hospital around 9 AM, Mama Rose took us to the ER where they put us on beds and started IV drips and took blood samples (Yay for letting IRR majors at Union practice their sticks on me!). Then they asked for a stool sample. First of all, Megan and I both had diarrhea (which is disgusting…). Second of all, the bathroom was disgusting. It looked like someone had taken a stool sample and wiped their fingers on the wall, and someone else had spurted blood on the wall (yeah, pretty gross). Anyways, they took our “stool” to get tested for things and we stayed in bed. Mama Rose stayed with us for a while and then Ryan came. While he was there we got some Gatorade, which was nice. Lunch came when he was there too. I took one look at the food and wanted to vomit, so I told Ryan he should eat it. After a while a nurse came and told me that if I didn’t eat something, I couldn’t go home. I understood, but I was not about to eat something that made me feel sick to look at (it might not have looked bad ordinarily, but I wasn’t hungry in the first place). When Ryan left, Lisa (the school secretary) came. After six hours of observations, they decided to admit us, so at 3 PM they took us in wheel chairs to a different room, which we shared with three Marshallese women. I took the bed by the wall and Megan took the bed next to me. They set up our IV stands and we were set to go. They told us they needed urine samples, so we got those (much better bathroom). The Marshallese women laughed at me because my IV stand wouldn’t roll very well so I had to carry it. I had to laugh too, because I thought it was pretty funny. Laying in my bed I looked at the walls and ceiling and saw many cockroach nymphs crawling. I was afraid of sleeping at the hospital. At supper, I ate corn and two scoops of rice and that was it. Megan and I tried to sleep, but the nurses kept coming and asking us when the last time was that we had a bowel movement or urinated (Nurses: just let your patients sleep!!! They’d get better faster…). Just when I was actually sleeping on my very springy and poking mattress, they would come back. Now, if my mom was the nurse, I probably wouldn’t be so annoyed, but some of the Filipino (most of the workers at the hospital are Filipino because they are educated) nurses weren’t as nice.
As with Tuesday, we had rotations of people to watch us on Wednesday. By far the best person on the rotation was Mama Rose because she is like a mom, which is really nice. We spent our day getting IV drips and going to the bathroom. They refilled my IV and then Megan’s ran out and she got her IV out. I was sad that they refilled mine, but Megan got her IV out. Mama Rose said that when she was in the hospital for having her kids that she had turned up her IV when the nurses weren’t in the room. I turned up my IV a little, and it made me happy when I finally got my “ball and chain” disconnected (although when Megan had her IV taken off, I got her stand which actually rolled). They let us go home around 3:30 PM with some meds, and we were very glad to leave. It was raining when the taxi pulled up to the house so we tried to hurry.
We still didn’t feel very well on Thursday, so we stayed home. I felt light-headed/headache most of the day so it was good I didn’t try to teach. By the end of Thursday Megan and I were feeling well enough to try going to school on Friday. We were feeling alright for the first bit, but then we were feeling nauseous and light-headed. We both went home at lunch time and took naps. A bit later we decided to make chocolate chip cookies to eat with our pills so we wouldn’t feel so nauseous taking them. They were yummy. We felt a little better after having naps, so we went to vespers.
Currently, I still do not feel hungry. I haven’t felt hungry since Sunday. I am hoping that when I finish the medicine I will start to feel hungry again when I need to eat. I have just been eating because I need to.


---I want to say a HUGE thank you to all of you who were praying for me and thinking of me. God definitely answers prayers!---