It isn’t easy to know how to walk back into a room I vacated months ago, without notice, while I ached for the connection to home and longed for the deadline. I picture those of you with your morning coffee, leafing through The Times and have turned the page and found me back in a familiar spot. I imagine you staring as if a television set has suddenly come on and a tiny girl’s voice is saying “she’s back”, as if I might be a distant relative of the Poltergeist. The truth is I feel I’ve been to hell and back. Being ill for any number of days isn’t fun, not for anyone. One day is too many, but sometimes we can crawl into bed on a cold February night feeling perfectly okay, only to awaken in the morning not knowing that somehow overnight we signed on to some weird sort of rollercoaster ride that wouldn’t let us get off for the next six months. But in all tough experiences, or so I believe, there is a lesson involved. I wish we could know that, could be strengthened by it while some hidden bacteria are trying to squeeze the life from us. The lesson often doesn’t show itself until the pain slows and softens, but that is the cue that we are winning. My pain has slowed and softened and I’m sifting through the experience for the lesson I was meant to learn.
A lot of life is spent getting through things, finding our way to the other side of difficulties. If no lesson happens then I’m not sure we’d bother. The first day I could breathe without pain and anxiety, after the very darkest of hours for me where I discovered I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was, I knew with great clarity what I hadn’t realized before. But first things first … how did I get here?
Our health care system is under siege. Covid challenged the best of us while draining the resources dedicated to health care. Most of us are aware of that fact and some areas haven’t recovered. I am one of the fortunate ones who has a family doctor whom I respect and trust. For almost four months my health had him stumped. I had two compression fractures in my spine, which isn’t all that uncommon for women my age. But why the severe pain and why the sense of getting sicker and sicker. June 11th, I took myself to my doctor’s office and I pleaded with him that something else had to be going on. “I think I’m dying,” I said, and I was kinda thinking the worst as we tend to do when faced with unexplained illness and pain. My doctor listened. He poured over the blood tests and x-rays taken of my spine. The radiologist had written – “further investigation required” on my recent x-ray due to a blurred image on the thoracic vertebrae. “You need an MRI,” my doctor said, his voice sounding alarmed. The next day I was rolled into an MRI and spent an hour in there while I forced myself to meditate to deal with the noise and the confinement. It worked. Before I could drive all the way home from the hospital, my doctor was calling me. “Pull over,” he said, when he realized I was in my car, and I did. Osteomyelitis was the diagnosis. I’d never heard of it. It is an infection in the bone and in my case, the spine. My blood had to be cultured immediately to determine the strain of bacteria that had settled in my body and had waged war. I also needed a biopsy so they could match an antibiotic to the bacteria with utmost certainty. Here’s where our health care system is lacking – only a Halifax hospital does such a procedure, and they had no immediate appointments available, and my body couldn’t wait. The bacteria had been enjoying rent free space in my body for almost four months. So, my doctor and the Infectious Diseases specialist decided to make their best guess. A PICC line was inserted in my arm following a vein up to my vena cava, the main vein returning to the heart. Seven weeks of intravenous antibiotics later the bacteria have been silenced. There is no way of knowing if they are merely dormant or gone for good. Dormant is the more likely prognosis. A repeat MRI showed the infection was gone and I felt like I had been given a get out of jail free card. Little did I know, the worst was yet to come.
wendistewart@live.ca
