a scare (long story and not for the weak of stomach)

Yesterday was a very bad day.

It all started on Saturday night into Sunday morning, when I woke myself up...whimpering! I had a blood vessel in the back of my head, on the right side, that was just throbbing. I have a history of migraines and I know exactly what they feel like, and this was simply not a migraine. I took Tylenol and went back to sleep, hoping to wake up feeling better. Well, I woke up feeling worse and took a Butalbital, which is the headache medicine I was given in second trimester when I had chronic tension headaches. After some food and coffee and then a long nap, I woke up feeling even worse. At this point I paged the doctor on-call at my OB/GYN's office, and sadly, got Dr. Pickler, our least favorite. I've sort of made peace with her, attributing her business-like attitude to strict professionalism, which is certainly respectable and a desirable trait in a doctor. However, sometimes you really just want to be listened to and cared about, professionalism be darned! Let's just say she didn't listen to me, didn't ask me any questions, acted extremely annoyed to be on the phone, and then told me to either go to the ER or keep taking Tylenol and call the office in the morning. What kind of options are those? To me, it was either "go bother someone else or bother me tomorrow." Ugh. Fortunately, after more sleep, I woke up feeling a wee bit better, even though I had an empty-head kind of feeling.

Then Sunday night into Monday morning, I had the same experience: woke myself up whimpering in pain. This time, not only was the blood vessel pounding and throbbing, but I'd also lost the hearing in my right ear! So as soon as the doctor's office opened on Monday, I called and pleaded with the front office staff to let me speak to a nurse ASAP, because I was having scary head pains and aches and I really needed help. Thank God the girl I spoke with was feeling sympathetic, because I had a nurse call me back within 10 minutes. I told the nurse what was going on, and she said, "let's not mess with appointments, just come on in." So I called Marty who raced home and picked me up, and we were in the office being seen by Dr. Hinton (our favorite) within the hour. I told Dr. Hinton the whole story and he started out by looking in my right ear, but he couldn't see anything because of too much gunk (sorry to be gross!). Then he touched my head and asked, "have you been running a fever?" And I had to confess that I didn't know, that I hadn't even thought to check. "Well you're burning up!" he told me, and had the nurse come in and take my temp, which was 100.1 degrees. Not too bad, but not good in a pregnant woman, for sure. Then Dr. Hinton started moving my head in different directions, and when he pushed my head back toward my spine, I had pain shoot down my spinal column, which he noticed when I flinched. He moved my head around again and then pushed back, and the pain was worse the second time. Dr. Hinton kind of made a face and left the room for a minute. When he came back in, he sat down on the stool and said, "Well, I'm sending you to the emergency room. I have a very real concern that you may have viral meningitis." I looked over and saw all the color leave Marty's face. Of course, this set off a rush of questions, but Dr. Hinton could only answer so many because he was going to hand me over to another, different set of experts.

So we walked out of the office and to the car, and I called my mom and I think I nearly scared her to death. I could tell she was extremely upset when I got off the phone with her, even though she was trying to hide it. So we showed up in the ER, only to have them send us to the Women's Center because of my obvious late-term pregnancy. We got to the Women's Center, only to have them tell us that we needed to go to the ER. By this time I was already losing patience -- my nerves were already fraying because of course, my head is still pounding at this point! -- so I told the Women's Center admin person that the hospital needed to figure out who would see me, and then someone needed to take me to that person because I wasn't going to keep walking around with a pounding headache and suspected meningitis. Sorry -- I needed to indulge in a bit of a diva moment! (I could tell my hubby thought this was pretty hilarious.) So I got wheeled back to the ER and was shown to a room about an hour later (and you all know how slow time progresses in a hospital, so it felt like 3 hours). After filling out paperwork and waiting another hour in my ER room, a nurse practitioner finally came in and asked me a million questions and told us she'd be working with an attending physician (who we never saw) on my case. She went ahead with the suspected diagnosis of viral meningitis and started all the testing. One of the first things she decided to do was have one of the nurses irrigate my ears, so she could get a good look at my inner ears. While one nurse, Tony, started on this, the other nurse, Rob, got started on my IV and bloodwork. Tony was quiet as he went about his business, but Rob was very talkative and very interested in my case. He offered all the insight he could give, then got my IV line going with absolutely no problems and no bleeding. I was duly impressed! Meanwhile, Tony got my left ear irrigated and my inner ear looked fine, so he moved on to my right ear. Here's where we're not exactly sure what happened: a) either Tony gave up because he encountered a mass in my ear canal, or b) Tony decided to finish later because it was time to take me to radiology for a CT scan of my brain. Anyway, off we went to radiology, and we met another great guy who was the CT technician. He had me sign a waiver form about how much radiation my unborn child would be exposed to (talk about guilty feelings as a parent, oh my GOSH), and then he got me settled on the table and piled lead blankets on top of my belly. At first this was okay, but as they scooted me back into the machine and I knew I'd have to lie still for 5 minutes, suddenly it dawned on me that I couldn't take a deep breath. Then just as suddenly, my little William started flipping out and trying to turn himself in any number of ways, and I realized he could feel all that weight on him and it was making him uncomfortable, too. At this point, I could barely breathe and I felt so bad for the 2 of us and I knew I was on the verge of tears, I started singing "Jesus Loves Me" in my head and praying, praying, praying that these horrible 5 minutes would pass immediately. Finally when I couldn't take it anymore, I cried out to the room in general, "I can't breathe!" The tech said, "oh we're done, I'm coming!" and rushed into the room and got the lead blankets off me and helped me sit up, and he realized that I was sweating and crying and breathing fast, so he got me a cold wet washcloth and got me wheeled back out to my husband as quickly as he could. I grabbed Marty's hand and said, "Look, this is just a headache. These people need to figure this out right now and stop torturing me and stop stressing out my baby!!!" My poor Marty, all he could do was comfort me and assure me that they'd figure it out as soon as they could. They wheeled me back to my ER room, and within a half-hour, my bloodwork and CT scan had all come back with negative/normal results. All along the plan had been to ultimately do a spinal tap on me, which is the definitive method for determining meningitis. However, Rob was the one who gave us the test results and right away he recommended against pursuing the spinal tap, since all my other tests were within normal parameters. Fine by me, I said, but what's causing the headache? Rob started to conjecture a bit and theorized that a hormonal shift in my body, due to labor being somewhat imminent for me, could be causing a very bad hormonal headache. Well, I wasn't buying, and I could tell Marty didn't believe it, either. Heck, I could tell Rob didn't quite believe it. So Rob left to get the nurse practitioner to come in and chat, and Marty got up to go update my mom. While he was on the phone with my mom, she asked him if anyone had ever finished irrigating my right ear. Marty said he wasn't sure, but he'd make sure it happened. Marty came back in and said to Rob, "did her right ear ever get looked at?" And Rob looked at it and could tell it wasn't fully irrigated yet, so he set about finishing the irrigation process (which hurts like the dickens, by the way, since they shoot a huge needle of cold water and hydrogen peroxide right into your ear canal). Finally Rob said he could see a mass plugging the canal, and finally he got it pulled out, and when he did so, I got immediately dizzy and nauseated and disoriented. Then he quick-looked at my ear and said with triumph, "There's your problem, baby-doll, that's the worst-looking inner ear infection I've ever seen!" This is apparently what happened...at some point on Saturday, my infected eardrum perforated and burst, and bled into some surrounding ear wax, causing a build-up of dried blood/fluid that plugged up my ear canal. Because of this mass, I didn't experience the normal dizziness/disorientation that occurs with an inner ear infection, because my tympanic membrane was being held nicely in place. However, this caused a massive headache, a fever, feelings of pressure in my neck, and of course, the loss of hearing in my right ear! Unfortunately for me, this so closely mimicked meningitis that it became the concern and the target of investigation. Unfortunate, in that it caused hours and hours of panic and fear and worry that I might have bacterial meningitis, which is beyond scary in all its implications; that I might have viral meningitis and be looking at an emergency C-section; or that I had something else equally scary and equally threatening to our unborn baby.

So...you can imagine the relief we felt when we got a very simple explanation for a mysterious headache. After a course of pregnancy-safe antibiotics for the infection and some ramped-up Tylenol for pain, I shall be good as gold and quite healthy when I go to deliver a baby in about 3-4 weeks. What a huge, huge relief!!!

Morals of the story:

1. You know your own body. If you have a gut feeling that something isn't right, keep demanding diagnostic procedures and tests until something is found. Several people tried to convince me that my headache was just a "different-feeling migraine." Um, what about that fever then? I knew, KNEW, this wasn't true. I knew something was off, something was different, something wasn't right. Keep the medical staff attending you on their toes until they find something! Believe your instincts!
2. Don't let a doctor blow you off. Go to a different doctor, even in the same practice. Don't worry about ruffling feathers.
3. Stay as calm as you can, even in the face of truly frightening scenarios. Pray, pray, pray. Jesus is near!