Recovery
or
"The Otorrhea" Is Not The Title of An Italian Opera

For those of you who didn't know, I've been very sick lately.

The illness struck Greg first, who developed ear pressure and pain on first one, then both sides. That was about two weeks ago.

I left for Vegas on the 16th, feeling shaky and nauseous. I slept almost constantly once I arrived. I chalked it up to nerves. After all, I had no appetite. I began to have feverish dreams, waking every hour or two to wander the house disoriented, before dropping onto the bed again.

Somehow I scraped myself off the carpet long enough to make it to The Pirate's Ball across the street from my house - in costume, no less. Nerves, just nerves, I told myself. A few drinks into the night, my senses were dulled enough to dance and frolic with the other pirates. See, I was going to be fine!

When I awoke from nightmares on the 19th, my lymph nodes in my neck were enormous. I could barely turn my head. I had pain inside my left ear, and couldn't walk around without bumping into walls. I had body chills. I had visual and auditory hallucinations. I'd never had a bug quite like it before.

Naturally I went to the doctor. My good friend Sam took me, as I was broke, and in no condition to drive. I had the equilibrium of a drunk. (Bless you, Sam. You saved my biscuits.)

The doctor was unsure which microbes were ailing me. After looking into all of my cranial orifices, I believe her exact words were: "I have no idea what it is, but let's give you some kickass antibiotics to knock it out of you." We began with an injection of Rocephin. She then prescribed me Doxycycline - 100 mg capsules, 2 of them a day. No kiddie stuff, here.

Rocephin is the antibiotic of choice for preventing infection after major surgery. It's also effective against meningitis, septicemia (blood poisoning), Necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria), bone infections, as well as typhoid fever. Among many other things. They administer it by injection or IV. I got mine shoved into my flank, which hurt like a bitch, but I didn't care too much. Injections work swiftly. I wanted to feel better as soon as possible.

Doxycycline will take just about any bacteria (and some parasites) out of commission. It's often used to prevent resistant strains of malaria. It'll help you if you've been exposed to aerosolized anthrax. If the Europeans of the Middle Ages had access to doxycycline, they wouldn't have known the scourges of black plague or cholera.

Either one of the two will take out every bacterial STI known to man.

I felt somewhat better the next day. Enough to go to the firing range with Sam. He's the one who took that freaking wonderful photo of me with the m249 SAW.

Don't tell the range master, but (guns + girl) = SEX^r , where r is how many rounds I shot on full-auto.

We also had a lovely luncheon at the Red Velvet Cafe. I recommend it for all vegetarian, vegan, and cake-loving types. They make the world's best desserts. All of them VEGAN. (Are the tears of angels vegan? I suppose they must be.)

By the next day, I had devolved into a bed-ridden amoeba. I was so weak and woozy, I could not stand of my own volition. I lay limp under the sheets, sticky and wan like a poorly made waxwork.

Arturo moved the spare bed into the living room, so I could watch movies with him and use the computer while I rested. I stayed in the same spot for nearly a week.

I'm unsure whether it was the illness or the medication, but while I lay that week, I endured strange symptoms, even as my throat and ears began to heal. Great purple contusions appeared mysteriously on my body. (Editor's note: as of 10/07/2010, the original bruises are still green shadows, and later ones are yet purple.) Nausea and vomiting kept me from eating or drinking for hours at a time. And the fatigue was smothering. Never in my life have I been so tired. Yet when I closed my eyes, demonic technicolor faces leered at me in the darkness, mutating into hideous crustaceans that smushed and garbled into one another until I begged Arturo to turn on the lamp and we slept in the light.

I recovered slowly. By the time I finished my antibiotics, I felt no more physical symptoms, and my appetite has returned, but the fatigue remains. How long it will be until it fully lifts? I don't know.

All I know is that Greg never had the bulk of my symptoms. Instead, his illness concentrated in his ears, dampening his hearing and causing him pain in both sides of his head. He also experienced the nightmares and feverish thoughts that made my illness so hellish. He also has otorrhea. Which in layman's terms means:

Kermit green goo coming out of your earhole.

Don't let the photo deceive you, kids. This stuff is Kermit the frog frickin' green.

Would someone like to tell us what on earth we had?

UPDATE 10/7/2010: We've both been given the clean bill of health. I'm still really tired, pale, and shakey. Greg is too strong to admit it, but he looks kinda sick still, too. Ears still leaking green fluid. Doctor says this is not worrisome. Whatever.

But it's not Lupus. It's NEVER Lupus.

P.S. Here's some articles on my antibiotics in case you guys think I'm making everything up. Copy and paste, you lazy bastards.


http://www.drugs.com/pro/doxycycline-hyclate.html

http://www.rxlist.com/doryx-drug.htm

http://www.webmd.com/drugs/drug-7012-Rocephin+Inj.aspx?drugid=7012&drugname=Rocephin+Inj&source=0&pagenumber=4


http://antibiotics.emedtv.com/rocephin/what-is-rocephin-used-for.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000848

Heartbreak
or
Way Out In The Water See Her Swimming

It hurts me viscerally that a girl can't be effected (yes, because it had an effect) by a song these days without being picked apart.


If I so much as comment on a song, that labels me "wannabe emo," or worse, "emo."


Human Nature so often disgusts me so much that I am loathe to write. You hear that, dissenters?

No, of course you don't.

Against your wishes I will post this:






I was there for their - for Placebo's - concert in Minnesota. In Minneapolis, to be exact. I thank them so deeply for even coming to the states in the first place. I was lucky to have a friend who was going to college there.

It changed my life.




I think I might have been born 50 years too late.

Lexamateur
or
The Zombification of Ms D.

I began taking Lexapro on June 12th, 2010.

How is it? Well, it's ok, I guess. It's not going to massively alter the course of my life, make me get down on my knees, and praise the pharmaceutical industry, but it's an interesting buzz, to say the least.

I won't go into the reasons why I need an antidepressant in the first place. That's the boring part. Suffice it to say that the last 15 years of my life have been steeped in the noxious brew of morbid depression. I can't remember a day - however pleasant - that wasn't tinged with internal suffering. Not one.

Drugs make sense to me. Happy pills. I don't recoil from the idea of taking a drug every day for the rest of my life, if it relieves my pain. Don't assume that I hadn't tried antidepressants before.

Paxil: I took it for about 8 days. It gave me outrageous mood swings. I would feel NOTHING - NOTHING - for 2 days, and wail like a tempest on the third. No thank you.

Celexa: The stuff is inert.

Prozac: No improvement. Headaches.

Zoloft: Felt like I'd been eating cotton wool. Headaches. I had an episode of suicidal ideation, but I don't imagine that's the drug's fault, as I have those once a year or so.

Lamictal: By this point, I was beginning to think that SSRI's weren't for me. Lamictal is a mood stabilizer and anticonvulsant with an off-label use for depression. Despite all the hype, it never did a thing for me. I took it for 10 months, hoping for a breakthrough that never came. No side effects, though.

Wellbutrin: Not a bad drug, overall. It worked for about two years, until it started provoking my anxiety to the point that I couldn't even go grocery shopping without freaking out. Also, it made my hands shake so badly that I couldn't properly use a soup spoon.


It's people like me who keep big pharma in business. *sigh*

Anyway, on to Lexapro.

I tried it at the behest of my beloved boyfriend. He takes the stuff himself, and appears to benefit from it. The poor man can't stand to watch me suffer. Seeing as it's one of the few antidepressants I hadn't tried yet, I decided to give it a whirl, with a 10mg starting dose.

It was WAAAAAAAAAY too much. I've never felt so awful in my life. I felt like I'd taken an experimental party drug instead of a pharmaceutical. It came on with a rush, like ecstasy. About an hour after I took it, I began to peak. My pupils were the size of saucers. My jaw clenched, and my body shivered as if I couldn't get warm. I began to panic as I felt myself unable to swallow, due to a lump rising in my throat. I felt nauseated and restless, yet I couldn't stop yawning. As for my mood, I was too frightened to notice any improvement. I spent the day in the bathroom while my GI tract purged its entire contents and spasmed abortively for hours afterward.

About 10 hours into that ordeal, I took a Xanax so I could sleep it off.

I almost didn't take Lexapro the next day. It took some pretty dedicated begging on Greg's part to get me to stay on the bandwagon. I agreed to half the dose - 5mg of Lexapro instead of 10mg. Again the symptoms returned, albeit somewhat lighter than the night before. I also felt incredibly spacey. I asked Greg the same question a few times in a row. I went between the living room and the bedroom a few times, forgetting each time why I had visited that part of the apartment. Pepto bismol took care of the GI symptoms. I was apparently very chatty.

Now, almost 3 weeks later, I'm still taking 5mg a day. Most of the physical symptoms have subsided, thank god. As for my mood, I am definitely seeing a change.

Like many people with long-term depression, I'm not the first to notice positive change. Greg assures me that despite a rough start, I seem a lot more tranquil all of a sudden. Less prone to "freak out" at the drop of a hat.

I'll agree with that. There's been a few instances in the past week where a certain chain of events (or "trigger," if you will) should have sent me into a wretched frenzy, but just . . . didn't. In short, my emotions feel shallow. I can see them playing across the surface of my mind, but I can't dive in. That goes for the positive ones as well. My affect has been flattened.

I'm not sure how I like that. I've always identified as an "intense" person, capable of exalted emotional highs, as well as marrow-sucking lows. We'll have to see how the next few weeks play out. Perhaps, after the drug stabilizes, the peaks will come back. Or, perhaps, the drug will teach me subtlety, and reset my emotional zenith and nadir somewhere closer to planet earth.

We'll just have to see. But for now, it's working.