Greetings from your Tired Girl!
It's been a busy few days for someone who considers taking a shower a workout and a trip to the supermarket a hike.
If you follow my social media you'll probably know that I have had some unexpected trips to see various doctors recently and as I'm sure many of you will know, trying to explain your health to multiple people whilst you don't feel well is exhausting. Particularly when those people are receptionists and appear to have a personal vendetta against everyone that walks in - but that's a story for another day.
Today, I'm going to be continuing from my previous posts about how I came to be writing my blog. (If you haven't read them, I would recommend going back to the previous posts, unless you are the kind of person who likes to read a story from the middle. We don't judge here).
After the conversation with the on-call A&E consultant (who my mum still likes to tell people was her absolute favourite consultant that I saw during my stay) I was admitted onto the Acute Medical Unit (AMU) which is essentially a short stay ward where they dump people they don't know what to do with. At this stage, nobody could agree whether I should be on a specialist ward or a general ward, so I was taken to a bay in AMU. I think I bought the average age down to about 75. There were 5 of us in the party room: myself, a woman I'd guess was in her 40s (judging by the age of her daughter) and 3 elderly women, the oldest of whom was 101 and couldn't open her lunchtime soup without assistance. I realise old age isn't contagious but in the few days I was there I did start to consider that it might be.
I was in the hospital for three days and in that time I had over 30 bloods taken, an abdominal ultrasound and a chest x-ray but disappointingly, still no diagnosis. I saw so many consultants in those three days that I lost count, mainly because I kept being passed back and forth from gastroenterology to haematology. The only thing that could be agreed on by everyone was that I was a total mystery. All of my blood results returned abnormal, but all in different ways. There was seemingly no correlation between my various results - I got the vibe this rather annoyed the hospital staff as each had their turn to tell me "you don't make any sense," through gritted teeth and a forced laugh. Believe me, it was frustrating for me too. At university we look at case studies fortnightly and we research around the topic using the information given in the case study. I like to think of it as a puzzle-solving game, trying to work out all the possible problems the patient could have and then narrowing it down to the most likely source. Sometimes if I'm really into a case I'll even decide what tests I would request next to determine the true diagnosis. Now, I was the case study and I was not having any of the fun.
On Tuesday Morning, having now not been outside the hospital for two days, when the doctor did the morning rounds she asked me how I was feeling about going home that day. Having planned to go home the day I arrived, I was quick to jump down her throat and plead that I was definitely well enough to leave. She half rolled her eyes I think, but not in a malicious way and she told me that she'd put a good word in to the consultant, who was less convinced given that they still had no idea what was wrong with me. The main theory that seemed to circle with every consultant I saw was that I had hepatitis A. This infection is usually spread through foods and drinking water in foreign countries and given that I had just come back from Greece, my symptoms seemed to perfectly fit. There was only one problem: no one else was sick. It confused everyone who spoke to me, as it seemed like such a solid diagnosis until they asked that question. Every time I responded that I was the only one unwell, there was always a small pause and a ruffled brow. Sometimes I would even get a small "hmmm" as though I might have been incorrect and would I like to reconsider my answer? Hepatitis A is generally considered to be highly contagious and even if that wasn't the case, it would be extremely unusual for multiple people to be eating the same foods and drinking the same water and only one of them to catch the illness. So it wasn't entirely ruled out but it didn't quite fit either. One consultant I saw decided to disregard the fact that no one else was unwell and put it down to sheer luck on their part, as he informed me with certainty that it must be hepatitis A. I often wonder whether anybody informed him of my true diagnosis later on, or whether he still walks around thinking he is the disease whisperer and can tell purely by looking at someone what's wrong with them.
I was informed that my blood count was pretty much in the toilet and had gotten worse again since my arrival on Sunday. According to the haematology consultant who had the job of telling me this, the possibility of doing a blood transfusion was discussed but given that nobody knew what was wrong with me it was quickly dismissed as likely to be a waste of time. So I was sent home Tuesday evening with a prescription of folic acid and instructions to return to the Ambulatory Emergency Care Unit (AECU) on Friday, in the hopes that by then someone would have diagnosed me.
So I left, smelling of disinfectant, wearing the same clothes I'd come in with and displaying an array of new bruises, but grateful to be leaving.
If only I had just gotten better from there.
Charlotte x
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