For the last two years, almost to the day, my, now twenty-year-old daughter and I have been trying to play catch up with this mysterious disease of unknown origin, that has invaded her body faster than we can keep up with. It seems ever since June 2008 our lives have been turned upside down, over and over again. I recognize the philosophy and logic behind the saying “that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” However, right now, neither one of us is feeling all that strong.
It all started innocently enough—not really. It came on fast and furious. I believe the exact date was June 18th, 2008. I was sleeping soundly in my bed when I was awoken by my then, just graduated from high school, and just turned eighteen-year-old daughter who was complaining of a severe headache. I will say that, looking back on the days preceding this evening, I had taken notice of her eyes being very bloodshot. We attributed the blood shot eyes to not getting enough sleep and the possibility of her contacts bothering her eyes, both of which were completely wrong. So, she wakes in the middle of the night crying about having a severe headache. I give her a pain pill that I had left over from my most recent gallbladder surgery, in hopes that that will give her some relief, at least until morning.
She was able to sleep after taking that mild pain reliever, but once that pill wore off, the headache was back fast and furious, and with the headache came complaints of vision problems. At first we kind of, once again, attributed them to the severity of the headache—possible migraine? No. I remember us driving to pick up my jeep from the dealership that Wednesday morning, and she was driving that morning, and much to my surprise she pulled of the interstate and told me that she couldn’t see well enough to drive and she was scared about that. I am not sure scared is really the right word to describe how she was really feeling or how I was feeling that day either. I had a more of a sinking stomach feeling that something was terribly wrong. Call it a sixth sense, women’s intuition, call it whatever you want, but anyway you spin it, I don’t have the perfect adjective for how I was feeling. Maybe impending doom would be a good descriptor.
Surprisingly, I was able to convince her to let me take her to the ER. Since she was still eighteen, I still had some say in her medical care. She agreed to going to the ER. We walked in and registered, and I explained her symptoms to the registration woman, who then immediately got a nurse, who then immediately took us back to an exam room. The rest of that day is somewhat fuzzy as things happened real fast and then at other times it felt like an eternity. The ER resident came in, I can still picture him to this day, young, good looking, but most of all he had that “concerned” look on his face that they desperately try not to show the patient’s but some people aren’t always able to disguise the “bad news” look. Side note: I am actually tearing up while I am writing this as it was and is the worst two years of our lives so far. She jokes with me now that things can’t get much worse as she doesn’t have that many organs left that can cause her any problems—that is a sad statement, but unfortunately a very true statement.
So, the ER doctor does an exam, and asks a lot of questions. At one point my daughter turns to me with that look like “help me” and I knew to be the one to start answering the questions. My daughter was lying on the gurney withering in pain, with her eyes shut, and at one point with her hands over her ears—that is how bad her headache was. At first my daughter was adamant about not having any pain medication because she has never been fond of IV’s, but she relented when I asked the ER doctor, “can’t you give her something for the pain now?” I believe they gave her a shot of Toradol, and within a few minutes you could tell it was working. Unfortunately, it wore off rather quickly or her headache got worse, we aren’t sure which, but nonetheless it was time for Morphine. The morphine came in handy because she was told that she needed a Lumbar Puncture to check for meningitis. At that point she was like, “Whatever, just do it.”
