Bad experience with Mondays in March

I’m deciding that I’m not so fond of Mondays in March. Today, the second Monday in March, marks the second time we’ve had to go to the French (health) clinic on a Monday this month. Last week it was the peanut…

We were giving the girls lunch before their naps when Kayla stops and tells us that she can’t eat any more. She had already eaten all her sandwich, so I had given her some peanuts to finish off the meal.  When Karis asked her why she couldn’t eat any more, she said it was because her nose hurt.  I don’t know why, but I got this funny feeling and asked if she had stuck something up her nose.  At first she was scared to tell us, but soon admitted that she had stuck a peanut up her nose.  I looked up her nose with a flashlight and, sure enough, there it was.  It looked close enough that I could just grab it with a pair of tweezers, but Kayla didn’t like the feel of something going up her nose, so she wouldn’t sit still long enough to let me get it out.  After trying for a little while, we decided we would have to go to the French clinic for them to get it out, so we left for the French clinic at 1:00PM.

We got there and had to wait for an hour or so because they were still on their break.  In the French system lunch break is usually like two or three hours.  Once we finally got in to see the doctor, it was the same story.  The doctor tried, but Kayla was so scared that she wouldn’t sit still.  She was fighting and squirming so much that I had to help the nurse hold her down, for the doctor to be able to extract the peanut.  However the peanut kept getting pushed up higher into her nose.  Finally, the doctor called a specialist who gave us an appointment at another clinic about an hour later.

Doctor at the French clinic tried to get the peanut out

When we got to that clinic – same story.  This doctor had better tools, but still was unable to get the peanut out because Kayla was squirming and fighting.  Finally he told us that he recommended giving her general anesthesia to put her under so they could get the peanut out.  He didn’t want to just leave it in the nose, because he was afraid that she might inhale it into her lungs if it somehow slid into her throat while she was sleeping.  He also didn’t want to try to keep getting it out because he was afraid that he might cause an injury inside the nose with as much as Kayla was moving.  So he called an anesthesiologist – which took her about an hour to get to the clinic – and gave her a shot of valium to put her to sleep.  They actually gave her a little too much because it took her over 1.5 hours to wake up from it instead of the .5 – 1 hour that they said.  We ended up getting home about 8:30PM, but we were just happy that our little “peanut” no longer had a peanut up her nose.

The specialist finally had to put Kayla under to get the peanut out

This week it was me and not Kayla.  Yesterday afternoon I started feeling really sore with body aches.  I took some ibuprofen, which seemed to take care of most of the pain and went about the rest of the evening – I wasn’t feeling the best but figured I was just tired.  However, I woke up about 1:15AM with uncontrollable shaking, like a bad case of the chills.  To my surprise I didn’t my temperature only said 97.2F/36.2C, but still could not stop shaking for 15 minutes or so.  I went back to sleep once the shaking stopped – under covers this time, but woke up at 4:30 with more body aches and a fever of 100.9F/38.3C.  I figured that, although we have been taking medicine to prevent it, I must have come down with malaria because the symptoms were similar.

So we went to the French clinic again this Monday, leaving the house about 8:45.  When we arrived, they started taking vitals and the nurse asked if I had low blood pressure.  I told him that it has always been normal, but he said this time it was coming in at 90/60.  I also noticed that I was feeling a little weird, almost like my heart was racing at times, so I started checking my pulse while I was waiting for him to finish filling out paperwork.  In the 15 or 30 seconds that I was taking my pulse, it seemed like my heart was skipping a beat periodically – I think it happened 2 or 3 times in 30 seconds.  I told them how I was feeling and asked them do a finger prick test to check for malaria – which ended coming back negative.  The doctor said, however, that they sometimes the tests are not always right, and gave me instructions to drive to a lab where they would run another panel of blood tests.

We were standing at the secretary’s desk checking out and getting directions to the lab when I started to feel really light headed, so I sat down in a chair right next to the desk.  All of the sudden I felt like I had better go to the bathroom (my stomach has been messed up over the last week), so I got up and headed for the bathroom.  When I got there though, my head was really swimming, my vision was going black, and I realized that I was about to pass out, so I sat down on the toilet as quickly as I could.  I stayed there for a few minutes till my head stopped swimming and then tried to get up again.  As soon as I did this, though, I got the same sensation, so I put my back against the wall and started sliding down to the floor.  My vision was going all black again and just as I was almost to the floor I felt my body go completely limp.

I called Karis on her cell phone and told her that I needed her to come and help me get up.  She came in and then called the doctor and told her what was going on.  The doctor helped me to a bed where she lifted up my legs to help the blood flow back to my head and had the nurse start taking my vitals again.  After a minute or two, I heard the doctor say that my heart was irregular, so they put me on another bed where they could prop up my feet and then started drawing the bloodwork right there.  They wanted Karis to drive the blood over to the lab so they could run the tests, but Karis hasn’t gotten her license here yet and she didn’t know how to get to the lab.  I called Steve, even though he is leaving tonight for two weeks, and asked if he could help us out.  He called a taxi driver who goes to our church, who came to the clinic and drove Karis over to the lab and then brought her back to the French clinic.

We had to wait for almost two hours for the lab results which showed that I did not have malaria, but a bacterial infection.  They gave me an antibiotic injection there at the clinic and also a prescription for oral antibiotics.  I’m not sure exactly what type of bacteria it is because we haven’t seen the actual lab results, but it’s really having a heyday with my body.  I feel like I got run over by a truck or something; my body aches from head to toe and my fever is back up over 101.5F/38.6C.  Tomorrow we’ll be going to the lab to pick up the results and then back to the clinic for a follow up appointment, so hopefully I’ll know more about what’s going on.  I’m just glad that we figured this out before it got any worse.

And I’m not looking forward to next Monday…  We haven’t exactly been having the best record with Mondays in March.