Did ya miss me?

*This blog post may contain too much information

Well, I am back home from the hospital as of last night and it is so great to be with my family and it was amazing to actually sleep in my own bed! I'm feeling much better- no pain or fever or life-threatening doom, just pretty tired and a little nauseated here and there.

So, everyone's been awesome with all their concerns and all the offers for help. Thank you, friends and neighbors, you are all amazing! (I feel like I'm writing an awards speech now) Thanks Amber for the long day you put in watching my girls! Thanks Jen for taking them today! Thanks to the awesome fam for bending over backwards to take care of our kids all weekend. And, of course, my SUPER AMAZING HUSBAND for everything he did to take care of me and our family and all the horrors he had to endure for me (hospitals, needles and blood are his worst phobia in case you were wondering). I really could go on and on, but you get the idea... I love you Ken!

Do you wanna know how I ended up in the freaking ICU? It's still really weird to me and totally unexpected, I don't really get it myself. Anyway, here's what happened: Last weekend I started getting a regular, dumb cold and just didn't feel good, but I was able to get by. I even went swimming last Wed and went to Cub scouts Pack night, but when I got home I started feeling worse- couldn't eat the dinner I made, headache, fever, horrible body aches. I went to bed and just had a terrible night thrashing, waking up Ken (he's usually the most solid sleeper ever). In the morning I told him I think I better go in to Instacare (and as a side note I thought I might have a bladder infection). We went in and they were all "Yep, bad UTI (urinary tract infection), here's an antibiotic and take some advil for pain." I took all my pills (nothing helped my headache and back pain), and a couple hours later I started vomiting and still felt horrible. I called the Instacare that afternoon to see if I needed to go back and they told me to go into the Emergency room for an IV if I couldn't keep my antibiotics down. I really didn't want to go the ER, super lame, right, so I got worse and worse all night puking, high fever, horrible pain. I couldn't keep down a sip of Sprite, a bite of cracker, or a piece of ice, Dangit!

So, there we went to the ER- I was puking in a bag the whole way there, I was in my stained jammies, my hair was in a rat's nest, and I was just shaking from fever. I was so glad I got in to the ER right away, so they could start poking me with needles and I got an arm IV. They did all sorts of tests and a CAT scan of my kidneys, and I peed in a cup (it looked like apple cider- I know you wanted to know that). After a while of all this my blood pressure dropped to like half of what it should be. I got rushed to somewhere and had to get this IV thing in my neck (it was horrible!). The doctor said I'm going to numb it now and then it felt like he jabbed a pencil into my neck (sorry for the visual). Ken said there was lots of blood squirting and the doctor fished a wire down to my heart and at that point he stumbled backward 4 feet down into a chair and put his head down. "We got a fainter!" someone said. Poor Ken, he scooted over and held my hand again.

I got moved over to ICU because my blood pressure was so low, my kidneys were infected, and I got blood sepsis. I was hooked up to a bunch of monitors all over my body and got a pee-pee catheter and I was pretty much stuck in bed unable to move at all, especially not my neck, cause it hurt! The blood pressure cuff stayed on and measured every 15 minutes around the clock- that was really annoying because I pretty much could only sleep 15 minutes at a time in the night, plus all the beeping monitors, people checking in constantly... it was super. I was in that room Friday, Saturday and then moved to a different floor the last day and got to get rid of most of the stuff on me. On Saturday I got to finally get up to walk around the ICU floor. It was really sad, every patient was all hooked up in tubes and no one even looked conscious, many of the visitors were crying it was awful! There I was walking around talking to the staff and all jolly. I was really, really out of place and everyone said something like "You're about 50 years too young to be here" or "You look too healthy to be here." Yeah, I got it, and it's weird.

Well, anyhow, that's a bit of a long story. I'm getting all better now and I am so thankful for our modern medicine that got me out of that crazy ordeal and back on my feet. That was a really a fast, horrible weekend I hope to never have again.