Sick day

I woke up this morning with some sort of GI awfulness. Fortunately, Peng was able to cover my patients at work ('cuz she's cool like that). I stayed home slept and drank fluids and ate popsicles and watched a day-long marathon of Law and Order.

I'm a little better. Hopefully, tomorrow will be okay, because I've been off both of the last two Wednesdays and haven't seen my Wednesday patients in three weeks.

Bleh.

(Aren't you glad I started blogging again?)

Ow.

My head hurts.

I've apparently caught some GI bug that's going around.

Went to work today, though. Was queasy all day. 

I do not love this Thursday...

Crater

So I have an ulcer.

I kind of had a feeling. The symptoms fit. I consulted with my esteemed colleague, PenguinShrink, who agreed, and confirmed with our esteemed colleague, Dr. Wikipedia. Two shrinks and a website can't be wrong.

Mercifully, I also had enough sanity left to consult my primary care physician. She listened intently. She took notes. She - wait for it - pushed on my stomach. I said, "ow!" She said, "I agree, I think you have an acid problem." She used fancy words like "esophagitis," which sounded even more wise and learned in her British accent. And she wrote me a couple of prescriptions.

And then.........but then she said.......

I have to give up caffeine.

I KNOW!!

When I came to, I asked if there was a specific milligramage of caffeine I should stay under every day. But my entire social life revolves around a coffee shop! My mind was racing. Okay, maybe I can live with decaf coffee - if I must - but half my fluid intake comes from iced tea!! She failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and waved me off. "I don't remember, but the more you can cut out, the better."

I blinked incredulously. I'm a doctor. I'm a fellow, for God's sake. How am I supposed to get through my day without caffeine? What, am I supposed to get SLEEP or something?! Does she not know what an insomniac I am?!

So I did a little research. Turns out, no one knows the caffeine content of my beloved iced tea. But an 8 oz cup of brewed black tea contains about 50mg of caffeine. As does bottled Lipton iced tea. My daily mocha? 160 mg. And when I think I'm being good and getting brewed coffee? At Starbucks, a grande coffee comes with a whopping 330mg!! Decaf coffee, in case you were curious? 13mg.

So, I'm gonna let the iced tea slide, for now. Because cutting down from 210 mg to 63? That has to be a big improvement.

My recently-pregnant officemate assures me, too, that she now is equally satisfied by decaf versions of our favorite afternoon ritual.

And I'm not real fond of this nausea and epigastric pain routine.

Hmm. I wonder what a decaffeinated Kate looks like?

Tough Tummy Tuesday

I'm sick. Weirdly, weirdly sick.

I woke up around 4am yesterday feeling pukey and with a significant case of the dry heaves. So I stayed home from work, and slept through most of the day. I didn't feel a whole lot better today, but I sucked it up and went to work for the first half of the day. I canceled my clinic and came home around 1. I wrote my notes from home, and ended up napping between each one. Good times.

I think I may have given myself an ulcer. I've been thinking this for a while, actually. And I'd blame all of this on that, except for the whole sleeping all day thing and the fact that my joints are all sore. But regardless, I picked up some Prilosec at the Rite Aid.

Whine, whine, whine.

Sick Leave

Yeah, I've been sick. As in, sick. Like, I wasn't awake for much of Wednesday, except when I kept waking up in a sweat trying to break my 102 fever. I still rattle when I breathe, but my temp is down to low-grade and I'm planning on going to work tomorrow.

So let me get caught up here...

Tuesday, my blog would've said something about how I came home early from work and was so not feeling good. And how I blamed Peng. Or Jen. Even though by then I was thinking it was the THING that everyone in the department has caught or currently has. And even though I work with both of them, it's hard to assign blame that specifically.....

Wordless Wednesday would've been a picture of my beautiful puppy enjoying the beach breeze.

And for Love Thursday, here's a couple of short lists.

5 Things I love about a sick day:

1. A completely legitimate excuse to get caught up on my DVR.
2. Strawberry Fruit 'n' Juice bars
3. My previous officemate, Peng, for covering the unit for me; Mike, for offering to not make me dump it on Peng; and my current officemate, Cleo, for doing her best to take are of me even though I wouldn't let her and that baby anywhere near my airspace. It's nice to know there are people down here who would come to my aid if things got any worse than the flu.
4. My nurse Maggie.
5. Really, really, really a lot of totally guilt-free rainy day naps.

5 Things I hate about a sick day:

1. That whole "being sick" thing.
2. Being quarantined away from my parents.
3. Missing our morning coffee roundtable (although - AHEM - I didn't see any of y'all offering to bring me soup. Just sayin'.), my friends, coworkers, and favorite patients.
4. Missing my Wednesday in Raleigh, which is my favorite day of work.
5. In the shower tonight (my first in a few days, I concede), I blew my nose (hush, you do it too). And popped my right eardrum in some sort of way that really pissed it off. So here I am, in the shower, with horrific vertigo. I can't stand up if I open my eyes vertigo. I tried to pop my ears again. I tried sniffing and blowing and poking at my ears and panting and everything else I could think of to dislodge that bubble, and yet nothing worked. I was about thirty seconds away from calling a friend of mine and saying "Help! I'm stuck in my shower!" when I realized - phone? Totally in the other room.

The moment when, while clutching to the wall and curtain and climbing out of said shower, the bubble finally popped? THAT makes the LOVE list. Whew!

With a little help

I'm nothing if not stubborn persistent.

So I mentioned I was sick, right? I actually went to the doctor yesterday, and she was like, "You have a virus." Which I of course heard as "There's nothing wrong with you." Which was, of course, wrong. And, doped up on ibuprofen and Cepacol, right, I got a little delusional this morning and started thinking, well, I know I said I wasn't going to be there today and arranged coverage and split my patient load between two of my colleagues (and I have a service full of rocks, so, I was guessing it wasn't going to be too awful)...I could probably make it through the morning. Never mind that I didn't sleep more than thirty minutes in a stretch last night or that I'm pretty sure my throat is the relative consistency of steak tartare, forget my barking cough and unit full of old people, ignore that I'm sweating like a sinner in church and I haven't even gotten out of bed yet...I'll be fine.

After all, there's nothing wrong with me. Just a "virus."

(Okay, what she actually said was "viral bronchitis and oh, hey, your spleen is enlarged.")

(Minor details. Who pays attention to that? There's nothing wrong with me.)

Ahem.

So I dragged my still-feverish self out of bed this am, pulled on the uniform (black pants, black sweater, some sort of shirt), and headed out the door. And fortunately for me, I stopped for coffee between here and work. Where my friends all took one look at me and went, "What are you, crazy?! You look awful. Go back to bed." And Sparrow (Goddess that she is), over text, was like, "What? I'm already en route to cover for you. Feel better."

I argued. I rationalized. I was stub persistent.But in the end, cooler heads prevailed (as in, those with a normal body temperature).

I actually went back to *my* apartment today. Which, honestly, I probably would've napped better at Shady Pines. The combination of pollen, accumulated dust, and dog hair in my bedroom (where I haven't slept since the end of March) turned out to be too much for my tenuous upper respiratory tract. But I did get a Cook Out milkshake out of the deal, and hey - that'll heal anything that ails you.

::whimper::

I'm so sick.

I'm rather done with this. Please and thank you.

Blehhhh, Monday.

Today, itself, wasn't too bad. However...I woke up at 3am, and was a little stuffier than usual. Went back to sleep a half hour later or so, woke up again when my alarm went off, started sneezing. And on the way to work, I couldn't stop sneezing. And by mid-morning, started to feel pretty darn crappy, had a little fever, etc. I got summarily dismissed from afternoon clinic, so I came home and slept after lecture. Had a milkshake for dinner. Missed Peng's housewarming party (I owe you a Riesling, hon). And am now going back to bed. I'm still holding on to the delusion that it's just a big allergy attack, but...

I did find this, though, that I think kind of sums things up:

Bleh

So I woke up this morning just feeling like crap. Crap-tastic, even. I had a weird migraine-y thing going on. So I snoozed for half an hour whining in my aching head about how awful I felt and how my tummy was unhappy and how I got kind of dizzy whenever I picked my head up...but I got up, and I got dressed, and I slumped down the stairs...and then had a conversation with my mom, who was like, are you nuts? Be a real person. Take care of yourself and go back to bed.

Wise, my mom.

And wouldn't you know it, a couple hours' sleep in a dark room helped a heck of a lot more than six hours of distracted therapy and two lectures would have. And as guilty as I felt about cancelling, my mom also pointed out that for the hourly rate they charge for me (which is, what, about $180 an hour more than I make), my patients deserved to have a doctor who was actually paying attention and not trying not to throw up on them.

I did get paged twice, though, out of my quiet, dark little den. One was Magical Corrina the All-Knowing, who needed my parking application (why do they create all this paperwork? I had parking. I'm still employed here. I want to keep my parking. Done. Is that so hard? Magical Corrina and I have other things we could be doing with our time), which was fine, because Peng was already on it and forging my signature on the paperwork I left on my desk and forgot to sign. The second page was this woman from the medicine service. It went something like this...

Medicine: Hey, I just had a few questions about this guy.
Me: Um, yeah, so, I think I only saw him, like, once. Remind me who he is?
Her: He's the guy with CF.
Me (amazed that that description actually did the trick, because, you know, like there's only one patient in the whole world with cystic fibrosis): Oh, yeah. What's up?
Her: Well, he's in the hospital.
Me: Okay.
Her: (silence)
Me: ...with a CF exacerbation?
Her: Yeah.
Me: Okay. So...
Her: Well, you know, there's a significant psychological component to it, too.
Me: Um...can he breathe?
Her: Oh, it's getting better.
Me: Uh-huh.
Her: Right.
Me: So...um...how can I help you?
Her: Well, I was wondering if you wanted to do anything.
Me: Uh, you know, I only saw him once, in the intake clinic, like a week ago.
Her: Right. And he's been taking the medication you prescribed, and went up to the full dose about two days ago, and seems to be doing pretty well on it.
Me: So, psychologically, he's doing better?
Her: Yeah.
Me: And...um...he can breathe?
Her: Yeah.
Me: (pause) Okay.
Her: So we were just wondering if you wanted to do anything else, you know, while he was in.
Me (trying to think of a way to put this tactfully): I...um...no.
Her: Oh.
Me: I mean, I guess if you feel like his medicine needs to be increased, you could go up another 5mg, but I think the thing he really needs is therapy. And we've discussed that, but if you could reiterate that, it'd be great.
Her (clearly frustrated that I just prescribed "therapy" for a "psychological problem"): Yeah, okay, whatever. Thanks.
Me: Well, glad I could help.

Here's a tip, for all of you consultants of psychiatry or future consultants of psychiatry or people upon whom others may consult psychiatry... Corrina aside, we're not magic. As our chairman is fond of saying, "We heal minds, we don't read them."

I still have no idea what she wanted me to do. The real reason they sent the guy to me was because they want him to stop coming into the hospital. I failed to do that with one 30 minute visit (he was 30 minutes late for his intake appointment) and ten days worth of homeopathic doses of an adjunct medication.

Uh....NO KIDDING.

I got a consult this weekend to come "talk" to a kid in the ICU who drank himself into alcohol poisoning because the team was too busy to find out "what was really going on." Yeah, like this kid's going to tell me. Surely they must realize that "Hi, I'm Dr. Kate, I'm one of the psychiatrists on call" translates, in the patient's head, into "Hi, I'm another random doctor. Clearly the team thinks you're crazy, which is why they called psych to come talk to your crazy ass." And when I balked a little at the consult, the resident call it in was like, "okay, and, so this is the second kid in two weeks we've had from his peer group with the same problem. We need to you to find out what's going on with them, see if there's like some abuse issues or something."

I? Am neither Colombo, Kreskin, nor DSS. And I do not speak the mythical language that makes teenagers give polysyllabic answers (I, too, still get "fine," "yeah," and "stuff"). But I couldn't actually seem to get out of doing the consult, and I figured (like so many of the ones that we do) it would actually be better for the patient to talk to me about it than the crazy Pedes lady who was overestimating my ESP, so I went and saw the kid. And discovered that, a, he'd already figured out this alcohol poisoning nonsense was a stupid thing to do, and 2, the other person from his peer group who'd had the "same problem"? Was a kid on our unit who tried to overdose to kill himself, not one with a raging case of bad judgment.

Sometimes I really have to wonder...what is it that everyone else in the hospital thinks we do?

Sick Day Weirdness

I'm sick.

So, I have again fallen to some random virus. Seriously, my T cells and I need to have a talk. I'm all feverish, and snotty, and I ache from my hipbones to my toes.

So I've been mostly asleep today. I took a venture out to Walgreens so I could dope myself up on NyQuil and Sudafed. And I found these:

From Brach's Orchard Fruits 100 Calorie Packs. They're teeny-tiny!! They're not Haribos, Barb (and they're probably not South Beach approved), but they're pretty tasty. And there's a pretty good pile of them for only 100 calories (provided you don't eat four bags of them at once. In my defense, they're awfully soothing on a sore throat).

Those are more cute, less weird. So in real weirdness, I've been watching a lot of MASH when I've been awake, and I keep seeing this commercial:



Did he seriously just say you could drink that?

Sick day

(I get them on the blog, too)

Had a wicked migraine today. Pain is better, but I'm still not quite right....need to go hide in the dark some more...