NationStates Jolt Archive

About 4AM Saturday morning, I wake up and notice that I feel like crap. I was sleeping on a friend's floor without a pillow, though, so I figure "no big deal, I'll go sleep in my own bed, take a hot shower, it'll all calm down." It doesn't, but I was sleeping at a weird angle, that might have been the problem. No idea why it hurts to swallow so much, but it might go away eventually.

Saturday night, the same friend (who lives about 3/4 mile away, up a steep hill the whole way) wants me to come back up to his place for his birthday party. He's been planning this for months, and he planned the date around my schedule, so I kinda gotta to go. He gives me some advil when he notices that I can barely stand up and I alternate between sweating like a pig and shivering while I wear three coats. Between that & being drunk enough that I couldn't feel myself anyway, I'm alright by the end of the night. A person in his dormitory suite tries to start a fistfight with me, right in front of a cop, on the way out of the building, but nothing too horrible occurs.

And then, brushing my teeth Sunday morning, I notice that the toothpaste's red when I spit it out. I look down my throat, and it's white and green in the back, and I'm coughing up blood & mucous. Student Health Services is closed on Sundays, and my mother's insurance just expired, so I can't go to one of the many hospitals around me. The hour it took to figure that out exhausted me, so I go back to sleep for about four hours, go to my DnD session, eat some soup (solid food really, really hurts right now), drink some orange juice, and go back to sleep. Total time awake that day- six hours.

I wake up today (monday), and wander down to student health again. I'm feeling much better than I was, but "feeling like crap" is still an understatment. My appointment comes, and they tell me to take off my coat, and refuse to listen to my protests. They take my temperature first thing, and... 92.1 F (about 33.3 C). I still can't put my coat on, 'cause that would make it harder to check my pulse/lymph nodes. My heart beat is twice the usual, Blood pressure has gone from (tuesday)104/52 to 92/90, and I when I check every single box on the "symptoms" sheet, the doctor double-checks and tells me that it's an understatment.

"I don't have time to run any real tests on you, though," he says. "Drink lots of fluids, get some rest, and buy some tylenol," he says.

Uhh, gee, thanks doc. Like I wasn't already doing all that?

After a little begging, he writes me a perscription for some painkillers. Still not helping, but, hey, it's better than the nothing he was trying to give me. "Come back in a week if you're not better. If you schedule an appoinment now, I might have some time then." Nevermind we don't know if I'll still be sick, then, but hey, at least he's offering to help.


Stupid fucker.

You didn't go to the hospitol because your insurance ran out?

Your throat's white and green + bleeding and you've been running a fever and he still won't prescribe antibiotics? He won't at least take a culture to check for a bacterial infection? Damn, that's some third rate medical service you got there. Hope you feel better, and don't be afraid to visit an emergency room. They're usually willing to let you set up a payment plan for your bill if you really can't afford it.

Bwaha. Lucky you, you can get to a doctor without a three week wait and without taking it to the extreme to get that appointment (marching into office after 4 hours on phone lines for 3 days and refusing to leave before you get an appointment)...

Your throat's white and green
toothpaste?

Sounds like somebody's been a busy bee. Say Ah!

Ahhh, that's the spot...*points and laughs* :D

Go to a real hospital. The "care" you got was insufficient. I'm sorry to hear that it will cost a lot.

I am so glad that I live in Canada and have excellent doctors at the student health centre on my campus. :)

But seriously, there must be some free clincs or something in your area. Or at least very cheap ones...

a 92/90 bp is really bad dude...emergency rooms are there for a reason

a 92/90 bp is really bad dude...emergency rooms are there for a reasonI've actually had a few like that before, while being relatively healthy- Around Dearest Mother Dear, I was in the high-critical range due to stress, and I've had 98/92 when I ate a whole jar of pickles a couple hours before giving blood.

Being me, I'm still trying to be up and around, just only on flat surfaces and never for more than 10 minutes at a time if I can avoid it. I figure, if I'm feeling better (even if I'm still in the "should be dead" range, still), I can't really need to go to the ER right now. If I feel like shit tomorrow, though, I'll definitely at least be going for a second opinion.

Hmm, this sounds dangerous. I recommend a folk remedy I invented - consume huge quantities of oranges, apples, and bananas.

This is a world-wide phenomena.
I've found through bitter experience that the Doctors at Student Health services are inadequate, to say the least.

One year when I was still at uni, I injured my back. I had been doing deadlifts - I tried 160kg and just made it, but when I tried again I couldn't even move the bastard bar and had difficulty just straightening myself out. That night my back started spasming and it was excruiating. So I knew exactly what was wrong and how I had done it. I waited a week, living off anti-inflammatories and panadol in the hope it would settle down and come right. It didn't.
It got worse, to the point that I couldn't sit down for more than 30 minutes before it would start spasming. As exams were coming up, this was a major problem.
So I toddled off to Student Health and saw the Doctor. Told her everything that had happened. She poked and prodded my back and sides, and came to the conculsion that I had a Kidney infection! I tried to tell (again) just what had happened but she just ignored me and booked me in for some urinary tests. I even pointed out to her that the most pain was in my lower middle back, not my sides, but that didn't phase her. She said I just couldn't tell where the pain was coming from!
I did go for the tests - which unsurprisingly came back negative. I didn't bother going back and confronting her cause by then I had gone to a private GP who actually bothered to listen to me and booked me into physiotherapy to sort my obvious (well obvious to everyone but the Student Health doctor) badly pulled back muscles back into place.


My other run-in with Student Health was even worse in some respects. A couple of years before-hand I had eaten some poorly-cooked pork (I had done the cooking, so unfortunately couldn't blame anyone else for this!) and developed toxoplasmosis - literally means blood poisoning. It's a parasite that is most commonly caught off cats (through contact with their faeces) and raw meat (especially pork). It's like having a bad case of the 'flu, but it lasts for weeks, sometimes months. I think I was sick for a couple of months with it, which sucked.
Anyway, after that I found that if I ate pork I would have an immediate allergic reaction in that I would start vomiting within a few minutes. It was so bad that I could get sick from eating other meat cooked on a barbeque next to some pork. Also sometimes - especially if I wasn't immediately sick because I hadn't eaten enough pork to cause vomiting (like once I ate a sausage roll, forgetting it had pork sausage inside) - I would be sick for a week or more with vomiting, very painful stomach cramps and really bad diarrhea (basically rusty water).
It wasn't pleasant.
Anyway, a couple of years later I was in Student Health about some other matter and mentioned this to the doctor (a different one, a male one this time). He told me very definitely that I had no idea what I was talking about, that it was impossible to get toxoplasmosis from eating pork and you can't have an allergic reaction to pig meat. When I disagreed with him, he went apoplectic and started almost shouting at me that I didn't have any idea about medicine.
Finally, because I stuck to my guns and kept telling him that yes, you can get toxoplasmosis from pork, he pulled out a massive medical dictionary to prove me wrong and read it out aloud: "Toxoplasmosis - caused by a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. Most commonly caught from contact with cat's faeces and eating pork (he faltered at this stage), but also can be contracted from lamb and venison."
At this point, rather than apologise, he told me that I still couldn't have caught it off eating pork but probably had contracted it from any number of sources. I again tried to point out that it's only pork that makes me sick, to which he got all shouty at me again and stated that it was definitely impossible to be allergic to pork. He then asked me if I had every vomited after eating anything else.
I made a vital error at this point. Only the week before I had bought some fish and chips from my local take-away. When I got home I ate a couple of mouthfuls but soon realised that the cooking oil they were using was rancid, so I chucked the rest away and made myself sick (the good old fingers down the throat). I told him this (including that I felt immediately better and suffered no ill effects, other than being hungry because there was no food in the house), and he triumphantly proclaimed that it was butter I was allergic to, not pork!
When I tried to ask him for an explanation (especially why butter? It was rancid cooking oil, for fucks sake!) he just told me to get out of the surgery as he had other patients to see.

Both these doctors were middle-aged (late 40s), so I can only conclude that they're there because they can't operate private practises anymore (probably too many complaints by ex-patients to the Medical board).

Out of interest, having toxoplasmosis proved to me just how dim the average person is. I would be in a cafe or restaurant and would ask the staff there what was in a particular meal. I would explain to them that I couldn't eat pork as I was allergic to it, and most of the time I would get the answer: "Oh, not to worry, this only has bacon/ham in it!". I've yet to see a bacon animal. I would get this reply even when I told them it was pig meat that made me sick, not pork. People are not very bright.
Luckily it's gone away now, and I came eat pork products with no side effects. It's especially lucky as I'm living in the pork capital of the World (Asia) where it's almost impossible not to buy something with pig meat thrust in somewhere.

I am so glad that I live in Canada and have excellent doctors at the student health centre on my campus. :)

But seriously, there must be some free clincs or something in your area. Or at least very cheap ones...
I', lucky to live in Australia for the same reason. Huzzah!

My doctor is really great. He's always checking back wth me about things I was worried about, or things I need done. He even asks me how I'm coping with my family issues! And he gave me a free three month supply of the pill! Hurrah.

Student health at my university has a basket of free condoms and a sign that says "Take one, you can always come again tomorrow"

All I can say is, going to school to try to have them cure you is not the way to go. They can't really do much for you to begin with, and they do not have the suffient amount of materials to treat a seriously ill person. And you got to think, this is school. The worst they ever treat someone is if they have a slight fever or minor cuts. Thats all they are really trained to work with. Anything more serious then that, like broken bones and really high or low body temps, and the kid is taken away in an ambulence. Im surprized that the school person didn't call your parents to tell them to take you to the hospital. Even though you are going to have to pay a lot, no matter what you will most likely end up in the hospital. People are going to figure out it was worth the money once your dead...

I should have been more grateful when the tylenol said "for hospital and government use only." T3 kicks ass. Tylenol with Codiene, sold at the student pharmacy, $1.75/bottle, for 50 500mg pills.

If I go more than four hours between taking two, I still feel like shit, but Sweet Fancy Moses, when it kicks in, I feel amazing. Granted, my tongue's still got green slime on it and I still do cold-sweats, but I don't mind it.

Hailowniss, I don't think I specifically mentioned the "university" part in there anywhere (I'd have thought that the "we have doctors who can write perscriptions" and "I tried on Sunday" bits would clue most in), but... we have real doctors there. Doctors, plural. Who wrote me a perscription for a student pharmacy- as in, they carry morphine and have the legal right to perscribe it. They can keep pace with a real hospital (and, since they share a building with one, I'd just have to take the elevator down two floors for any massive surgery), they just choose not to do any more work than they have to. And since my parents are about 5 hours away... well, that's just out of the question.