All My Current Problems
by Peet Chamberlain
I don’t know exactly what this disease is, but it’s definitely a disease. Why else would I be in this hospital bed hooked up to all sorts of machines and choosing between red and green Jell-O?
I’ve fantasized about this scenario plenty of times before: I’m at Maine Med, an IV in my arm, family and friends standing in a weeping semicircle. They’re all here now, but they don’t seem as concerned as I thought they’d be. They bring breakfast from McDonald’s, but they don’t cry. I cried my eyes out when my doctor, after the second round of testing, called to tell me I had an unknown infection swimming around in my bloodstream and needed to go to the hospital ASAP.
This wasn’t why I’d braved the doctor’s office! They were supposed to tell me things like “That’s not cancer” and “Those aren’t AIDS.” When your physician starts using words like “unknown” and “hmmm” while discussing your illness, you know there will be uneasy days ahead.
On past visits to the doctor’s office, the receptionist at the check-out desk would hand me a slip of paper that summarized the reason for my visit and listed my medications and allergies (“n.k.a.,” thank you). Beside that list was one noting “all of your current problems” the prescriptions were treating (escitalopram for anxiety/depression, acetonide 0.1% cream for eczema, etc.). Although I considered it a bit high-and-mighty of my doctor to claim he knew all my problems, it was reassuring to look over this list and not see a potentially life-ending disease.
The list helped keep my hypochondria in check. People who suffer from anxiety/depression spend a lot of time worrying about diseases they could possibly have. I’m not sure whether that’s a side effect of the anxiety or a cause. What I do know is this worrying gives me a headache, and headaches are a symptom of brain cancer, as any hypochondriac will tell you.
Then, last spring, I began to get high, shaky fevers. The second episode involved vomiting and bed-sweating. I realized I had a new “current problem.” I needed to get the list updated. I needed to call my doctor.
Of course, when you call to set up an appointment with the doctor, you most likely won’t get to see the doctor. They usually send you to see the nurse practitioner, who will first ask you why you’re there (anxiety/depression patients also get routine questions like, “On a scale of one-to-five, how much is your life worth living?”), then send you somewhere else for tests.
The results of my first blood test indicated the fevers might be caused by a Vitamin D deficiency — a deficiency that affects approximately 100% of New Englanders by the beginning of March. If that was the cause, then how come my friends weren’t throwing up? Why wasn’t my girlfriend sweating the bed every night next to me?
In the past, taking vitamins had made me nauseous, but I started taking Vitamin D anyway. During the week that followed, the fevers stopped. And as long as I didn’t take the vitamins on an empty stomach, I found that I could ingest them without wanting to puke.
But just as I began to think I was in the clear, the fevers returned, this time with higher temperatures and achier chills. On the bright side, I was getting sent home from work with plenty of paid sick time and a great excuse to avoid any activity that required rising from the futon. I was able to keep myself busy for awhile, but eventually I got too weak to write a bass line or draw. People close to me urged me to go back to the doctor’s office. I avoided making the call for another couple days.
Then my hand swelled up.
Back on the Web, I learned that common reasons for a swelled hand include pregnancy, arthritis and serious disease. Another site added insect bite, cellulites and heat edema to the list. I concluded that I either had an insect bite or a serious disease. I called the doctor’s office again. This time, I was seeing an actual doctor.
I’ve sort of been between physicians since my family doctor retired last year. We’d been through a lot together. I’ll never forget the time, back in ’97, when my cousin showed me a home testicular-cancer-exam pamphlet while we waited at a Wendy’s drive-thru. I soon became convinced my left nut was rock-hard and achy (you really can make different parts of your body ache if you worry about them enough). These were sure signs of ball cancer. I figured I’d be dead before my high school graduation the next year. It took me two months to summon the courage to say “hard” and “balls” to my father so he would call and make an appointment. I’m glad he did. Otherwise, I’d still be worrying. Dr. Saffer gave me a more accurate exam and concluded that, no, neither ball was more swollen or hard than the other. It took him about eight seconds to relieve months of mental trauma.
The new doctor I was assigned is half Dr. Saffer’s age, with twice as much hair. After the “You’re not going to kill yourself now, are you?” questions, he told me my current condition was both more serious and mysterious than before. The higher fevers and swelled hand meant I needed blood cultures, instead of the standard blood work. It also meant Vicodin.
I took the maximum recommended dose of pain killers to minimize the swelling, and went to bed feeling swell. I had the dream I have every night, the one in which I’m at work but it’s not really work (What are you doing here, mom?). My phone rang at 6 a.m., interrupting the part of the dream when I’m driving south on I-295 toward the Portland that’s not really Portland. It was the lady from the blood-culture lab calling to tell me my tests had resulted in more questions. “You need to call your doctor’s office as soon as they open to see if they want you to go to the hospital or not.”
That’s what I remember her telling me. And that call to the doctor’s office led me to this hospital bed, where I slip in and out of consciousness at two in the afternoon due to synthetic morphine and turkey sandwiches. The hospital doctor has just come in to inform me that, after two days of tests and observation, they’ve figured out what I have.
“What you have is called an alpha-strep infection of the bloodstream,” she says. I’m too doped up to understand, though I do know that now that they have a name for this thing, I can go home. But first they have to insert the PICC line.
PICC is an acronym for “peripherally inserted central catheter.” Basically, my infection has gotten so bad that antibiotics must be injected daily, rather than swallowed in pill form. A nurse will numb me before sticking a vermicelli-size tube into my upper right arm. The tube goes up and across my shoulders so the other end can dangle next to my heart. This thing will have to be inside me for two weeks. A visiting nurse will show me how to properly take my medicine at home. I will discover I’m among the 10 percent of the population that can taste saline as it’s injected into them. I will think I’m smelling it, because it never touches my tongue, but the nurse will tell me I’m tasting.
I still won’t know what an alpha-strep infection is. Web searches lead to vague answers. “If strep throat fucked a blood disorder” is the closest I can describe it to friends.
A couple weeks from now, my girlfriend and I will be window-shopping in the Old Port. We’ll pass a shop selling wooden signs with comforting quotes painted on them. “Most of the things we worry about never happen,” one says. Maybe most of them won’t happen, I’ll think, standing there with a blue plastic tube sticking out of my needle-bruised arm, but chances are one of them will. And it will be terrifying.
