My friends all call me a dirty hippie — yes, to my face — but I beg to differ … I’m more like a hygienic hippie. I mean, sure, I do hot yoga, but I shower afterward. I just prefer holistic medicines over Western ones. That was, until last week when I found myself in an extraordinary amount of pain and sicker than I’ve ever been in my life. I even broke out the half a bottle of Hydrocodone that I hoarded from an accident I was in back in 2006.
You see, over the course of three weeks I felt my health declining slowly … treating each symptom as a separate, non-severe entity. I wrote off the swelling as bloating and weight gain, and when my skin started getting scaly, I just figured I was getting old. The chronic fatigue and back pain was just jet lag on top of a bladder infection … so I went and got acupuncture. But when that didn’t even help — and my fever went up to 103 — I figured I had become another candidate for Swine in '09, which elected me to go see a real doctor ... something I’d been avoiding because not only am I a holistic hippie, but my insurance plan with my previous employer ended recently, so I am on a temporary freelancer’s policy at the moment. That said, I basically only have “shit happens” insurance … and well, shit happened.
I couldn’t even make an appointment with a doctor because everyone I called pretty much hung up on me when I told them my coverage. Considering at this point I couldn’t eat, or sleep and could barely walk, I slathered myself in Tiger’s Balm, took an expired Hydrocodone, put an Icy Hot patch on, and dragged myself to the minute clinic at CVS. I told the lady my long list of symptoms, and she gave me a look over. She placed some pressure on the spot where my Icy Hot patch was, which just so happened to be my kidney, which resulted in me squealing in pain so high-pitched that only dolphins and bats heard it. “It’s your kidney!” she gasped. She yelled at me like my mother did about waiting so long to see a doctor. “You need to go to the hospital, like now — here are directions.” I did not pass go, I did not collect $100 – I went straight to Urgent Care. Sure enough, I had a really bad infection that had been brewing and spreading in my kidneys for almost a month, flooding my body with toxins. So, they drugged and doctored me up. I took a slew of tests – aced them all. And I lived happily ever after.
Or so I thought.
After my tests, a group of nurses came into my room with that face you make when you have to deliver news the other person doesn’t want to hear — avoiding eye contact and speaking in a lackluster tone: “Brittney, I know you because I always read your column… [thank you] … so, I hate to tell you this, but”… long pause.
The dramatics totally freaked me out.
“But, you probably shouldn’t drink for a while — and you should maybe consider staying home for a change until your kidney functions properly again.”
That’s it? I thought she was going to tell me I needed to go on dialysis or something — something bad. Though it has been hard for me to sit still, I needed to cop a squat in life. And it’s a small fee to pay for actually being able to heal. But the good thing about being sick is that I will never again take feeling good for granted, and really feel good. If you are healthy enough to get out of bed … then it’s going to be a good day.
And just so you know, there is no nightlife in the hospital. The cafeteria even closes early, but there is a pizza vending machine in the waiting room. A vending machine that makes pizza … really?
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