Pneumonia: A Memoir
Pneumonia kills you softly. Compared to when I’d had kidney stones or dysentery, my pain was not that bad. As my lungs drown, and my fever spiked, I stopped noticing discomfort.
It had been a dreary week, and I was freezing. I drove home in winter gear with the heaters blowing full blast. I swallowed Tylenol cold and flu and dove under the covers. I woke up, skin burning, and feeling drunk. I flung off the blankets, and checked my temperature — 40 degrees. Even my fever-addled brain knew that was too high. I took 2 Advil to bring it down, and laid still, not wanting to create more heat. The 3 am haze swept me away; until I woke to the feeling of drowning.
My clothes and bed were wet. Not damp, wet, like spilled juice on a tablecloth. I had water in my lungs; sticky, choking, oozing water. I don’t remember when the coughing finally hurled the first bit out. A whole mouthful of slimy, salty mucous, that I half-puked into the garbage.
I peeled off my sopping clothes and began to shake as I pulled on clean ones. Too exhausted from the coughing to completely strip the bed, I put new bedding on top of the sweated stuff, and went back to sleep.
Every few hours, I’d wake up, coughing and either shaking with cold or burning up. I took baths to bring down the fever. I gobbled antipyretics like candy. What seemed like only a day of flu ridden misery had actually stretched into three. My boss, incredulous that I was as well as I kept claiming on the phone, came over to check on me.
I was far sicker then I’d sounded, he’d said, so he’d called an ambulance.
At the time, I did not comprehend how sick I actually was. The oxygen monitor, I later learned, had listed my blood oxygen saturation level at 92%. For reference, a healthy person is usually between 96 to 98 %.
At the hospital, the doctor admitted me after a well-honed once-over from across the room. They x-rayed my chest. They took vial after vial of blood. They gave me two litres of saline. Apparently, I was dehydrated.
My first two days in the hospital were an absolute blur. I could only remember snippets. The beeping of the IV pump as it faithfully pushed the antibiotic cocktail into my veins. The sweet hiss and gurgle of the oxygen nebulizer whispering saline-soaked Salbutamol into my lungs. How my heart would race and pound, for an hour, after every dose.
But most poignant, was the miserable, constant, coughing. Those gagging, retching, waves that pulled pools of sickness out of my chest. I remember how I spit mouthfuls of itchy, oily, slime over the bedside, so I could try to breathe. Over and over and over again.
On the third day in the hospital when my fever came under control, the nurse asked me how I was feeling. I weakly replied “Well, I feel awful, but I’m not going to die.”
She told me that the day previous I had stated specifically that I felt like I WAS going to die. What a difference a day makes.
When I checked my phone, I found several ‘get well’ wishes from acquaintances on my Instagram account. There was no photo on my regular feed to account for this. After a panicked call to my best friend, I discovered that I had Instagramed a random picture of the I.V. in my arm, not to my friends, but to acquaintances. Hence, the generic, yet polite, well wishes.
On day four, the muting effect the exhaustion had on pain evaporated when the drugs began to win. Everything ached. My bottom ribs poked into the wrong places. All the fluid in my skull walled itself directly behind my forehead. Each cough bounced my eyeballs forward too far in their sockets. My hips and spine were enraged at being forced to sleep in a constant ‘V’. I would have sold my soul to be able to un-coil, and lay down flat. Each time I tried, the sludge in the lower part of my lungs would seep over more pulmonary real estate, blocking off air. I coughed. So, back up I sat.
No matter what the rest of my body was doing, my feet were always soaked in sweat. The antibiotics, which tumbled down my throat every morning, and swam in my veins every night, turned anything I ate into diarrhea. Not the cramping, painful diarrhea of the flu. It was a CASUAL diarrhea that just dropped in, unannounced. Each trip to pee, was now fraught with the danger of an unwanted deluge.
On the fifth day, I was able to walk from my hospital room to the x-ray, about 200 meters away. I expected the usual asthmatic lung squeeze of trying to suck oxygen through a straw. Instead I felt as though I had walked all day, and desperately needed sleep. My lungs felt ‘open’, but my body wanted to collapse.
Day six brought the lung physio. With any sickness that causes your lungs to stop taking deep breaths, you have to re-learn how to do it. Enter the ‘Incentive Spirometer.’ I had to take long, slow, inhales, and keep my lungs expanded so that the little plastic disc stayed where the doctor wanted it. It was basically yoga for lungs, and it was annoying.
They let me out on day eight, with a fist full of prescriptions, and a stern warning not to exert myself for a month. I asked what had caused the pneumonia, and for all of their tests, they could only answer ‘We don’t know.’ It was viral and bacterial. That’s all they could establish. The doctor used three “very’s” to communicate how sick I’d been. So I figure that Death had not come to my door, but he’d waved from across the hallway.
For as epically grim as this all was, I walked out of that hospital feeling grateful. I am so fortunate that I live in a country where a hospital stay doesn’t mean financial ruin. I am so grateful that I was treated not based on my ability to pay, but on what I needed to get well again. If I had not had universal health care, I most likely would have been unable to pay for my hospital stay. I might of resisted going to the hospital for fear of the cost. Had that happened, I am assured, I would have died.
