I have some beautiful flowers by the kitchen window, a sunflower with some pink carnations and some tall purple flowers... Darren and Nancy sent them to brighten up my hospital room this week. I had pneumonia and a lupus-related bleeding-lung problem.
T got sick early this month with what seemed like just a productive cough. MissK caught it two days later, LittleDude was next, then it was my turn on June 11th. K had been flying out of the east coast for two weeks, and when he came home on the 12th I started living on the couch with a tissue box, coughing up my lungs. I pulled it together long enough on Monday to drive BossLady to her soccer practice, but Tuesday morning after the girls' camp physicals I had to see the doctor at the Valley Clinic because I was just too sick to put it off any longer. She had a chest xray taken, sent me home with antibiotics and said it didn't look like pneumonia.
The next morning at 8:45, the pulmonology nurse at ANMC called to say I needed to be admitted. I was actually kind of relieved - my body was screaming at me with pain in my right chest and I was walking hunched over to make it easier to breathe. What I didn't know at that point was that the radiologist who read the xray from the day before had stated that my lungs had multiple round lesions that looked like metastases (cancer spread from elsewhere...). So by the time K and the crew and sick little me arrived at the hospital, the staff was ready to scramble to get me admitted and tested and medicated. I had a CT, a bronchoscopy, and probably a quart of blood drawn. Then I settled into my room to watch tv, have visitors, order room service and watch the i.v. drip. The quiet was nice, REALLY nice, but I missed the family and everything. I couldn't sleep, either. I got so bored that I walked to the nurses' station and had them print my xray and CT reports. So that's when I figured out what was up, but I knew it couldn't be cancer.
I got out yesterday. The doctor believes that the strange lesions the radiologist saw were actually blood in my lungs, a rare lupus complication. I googled it (diffuse pulmonary hemorrhage) and it sounds right. About all I want to do is look at the films, because that's what I'm used to... not vague explanations and dumbed-down terminology. I'll go back on Wednesday for a follow-up xray and more lab tests. Now I just have to get back into the routine, if I can stop having 3-hour naps.
