This story takes place in 2005. It was adventure of a lifetime. Also super embarrassing, pretty gross, and way too much information to be sharing with you guys. But that hasn't ever stopped me before. Ha! :)
I had spent eight days in Ireland with friends, having the time of my life. We saw as much as was humanly possible in eight days. This involved not really ever getting out of the car, except for short stints through a town to pick up more nutella. It was an incredibly cheap trip - my part, including airfare, was about $500.
When I got home, I was incredibly sleep deprived and jet lagged, but nothing else seemed wrong with me. That turned out to be very not true.
About two weeks after being stateside, I noticed a strange tingling in my feet. It was like they were constantly "waking up." You know the feeling... numb and tingly and remarkably painful. You also know me (to varying degrees), so you know that I wasn't terribly worried about this development. Stranger things are always happening to me. I just carried on with my pseudo-normal life.
Later that week, it was getting harder to ignore. All of the muscles in both of my legs were completely contracted. Yes, this seems impossible since they go in different directions, but that's what happened. Every muscle was tensed, which put all sorts of strange strain on my joints, tendons, ligaments, and patience. I couldn't walk normally. I did the toddler walk: all joints locked, just swinging the whole of my leg in a weird semi-arc.
This was incredibly unusual, even for me. To the doctor we went. Since I had recently been out of the country, the first assumption was that I had acquired some sort of water-borne parasite. I was sampled from many, uh, angles, but nothing showed. "Everything looks fine," they said. Obviously things weren't fine because a fourteen year old couldn't walk, but whatever.
I related this tale to my physical therapist during one of my routine appointments and she... freaked out. Ok, KC was prone to panicking when it came to me, but this merited a bit of panic. Especially after she ran some neurological-muscular system tests. And I failed. All of them. Spectacularly.
She ran to the nearest phone and called her friend, the head neurologist at Children's Hospital and asked him to come back to the hospital. He had just gotten home after a 24 hour shift, but she insisted that he come back just for me. Then she trundled me across the street to the hospital. I was x-rayed, catheterized, rectal examined, and prodded til I cried. The neurologist took my frighteningly bad test results and told me either I had this thing were the end of your spinal chord starts fraying like a horse's tail, which basically meant I would die OR he had no idea what was wrong with me so I would probably die before they knew how to fix me. GREAT. Just what I wanted to hear.
He ordered a STAT MRI, which ended up being at like midnight or 2 in the morning or something crazy like that. He told us he'd call with the results as soon as he could get them. I went home, limping and crying pathetically, to await the news.
When I woke up the next morning, the rigid muscle thing had spread up to my stomach and back. Breathing required Herculean effort. I was lying on the floor, gasping for air, and Mum called the hospital. The order to ship me to the hospital was given and we packed me into the car. It was raining, the freeway was backed up and Mum decided that this was just a stupid way to take someone in respiratory distress to the hospital. She pulled off at the fire station and requested help. The station's own paramedics were out on a call, so they called the neighboring station to come get me. As eight incredibly good looking young men got out of their red vehicles, they were all laughing to themselves about how they had never rescued someone at someone else's station before. They found it super amusing.
I was not terribly amused. I was not terribly thrilled, either. I had always thought that it would be fun to ride in an ambulance. Lemme tell you, though: it's not. Especially when you're strapped to a backboard and poked full of IVs and attached to a 18 lead EKG. It's just bumpy, uncomfortable, and you repeatedly slide nearly off of the gurney. Not fun. At least until they pump you full of morphine. Then it's fun. I don't remember much of it. I just remember being incredibly pleased with life.
Once in the emergency room, the doctor ordered more x-rays. I protested, insisting that I had already had x-rays and that I was tired of them. She didn't heed my protestations, but wheeled me off to the x-ray tech. The doctor came in with my x-rays, put them on the board, turned to me and said, "You're full of it."
Uh, what?
I stared at her, still very drugged, but awake enough to realize that I should be incredulous. "Full of it," she repeated. "Full of poop." She pointed to the abdominal x-rays and explained the significance of the big grey blob. "See this?" she said. "This shouldn't all be there. There's so much stuff in there that it's pressing on your spinal chord. That's why you're having neurological symptoms. We'll just give you an enema and you should feel pretty normal in a few days. It will only take about a year to be absolutely fine."
"Buuuuut...." I couldn't really formulate a more cohesive thought than that. I was incredibly embarrassed. Specialists, MRIs, culture analysis, an ambulance ride, etc... all because I was constipated?
"Don't worry, honey. I know this is embarrassing. But really, it's actually completely appropriate that you were rushed here in an ambulance. A few more hours, you would have gone septic and would have been in the hospital for months. You really could have died."
Oh. Death by constipation. That was a novel concept.
And so, the moral of the story is: don't travel too cheaply. If you don't eat right and don't ever get out of a car, you will throw off your internal equilibrium and end up in the hospital. And hospital bills are much larger than food bills.
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