The Nutcase Files: June 2011

*warning... some of this is kind of gross. If you don't like reading about people's medical experiences, don't read this.*

The incident happened in December of 1984, when I was 12 years old and in the 6th grade, but there are many details which remain crystal clear to my memory, as if I were looking back at a recent event instead.
Prior to the encounter, I was sitting in my mother's favorite chair, drinking hot chocolate and doing my math homework.

Math has always been one of my favorite subjects to study. I enjoy solving equations the same way I enjoy doing crossword puzzles, untying knots, and finding my way through mazes.
My grandparents were in the room with me. They were at the house to babysit because my parents were both out working, photographing an event which was going to keep them out beyond my bedtime. Grandma was watching Murder She Wrote on T.V., and my attention was divided between that and my homework.

I was momentarily distracted by an itchy, stinging sensation on my elbow. When I reached to scratch, I was surprised to find a mosquito there. I remember thinking how unusual it was to find a live mosquito in winter, when there was frost on the ground in the mornings. Where could it have come from, I wondered.
Because it struck me as odd, I mentioned the bug to my Grandparents, who said it had probably come from the basement. We thought nothing more of it at that moment.

I finished my homework, and watched most of the rest of Murder She Wrote, but not the end.
As I worked on my assignment, I began to get a headache. I thought maybe it was because I kept looking up at the T.V., so I quit doing that and concentrated on the equations in front of me. The headache continued to worsen, starting at the back of my head, and spreading up and around to settle into my forehead, creating the sensation of wearing a very, very tight helmet. When I finished my homework, I told my grandmother about the headache, took a couple of acetaminophen, and began to get ready for bed.

Once I was on my feet and beginning to move around, however, the next symptom kicked in. If you have ever had really bad motion sickness, you know how I was feeling.
At first, I was just a little dizzy, like one might get after riding a merry-go-round at a kids' playground. I'd all ready had my first migraine, so at the time, I thought that might be what was happening. I went into the kitchen and prepared an ice pack for my head, but before I could use it, the first wave of nausea hit, and I fled to the bathroom to waste two cups of Mom's good hot chocolate and two undigested acetaminophen tablets, dropping the bag of ice in the bathroom sink on the way. The nausea didn't subside until several heaves after my stomach was empty.
Grandma had heard me running, an in-the-house-no-no, and she caught up to me just as the fun started. She brought ginger ale from the kitchen to try to calm my stomach, but it wouldn't stay down. Instead, I found myself in the midst of another round of heaves.

I also felt like I was in an oven. Telling Grandma that I was too hot, I shut the bathroom door and removed my shirt. Grandma grabbed a thermometer, shook it down (anyone else remember mercury thermometers, LOL?) and stuck it in my mouth. A minute later, she read it and told me I would not likely be going to school the next day, and that the nausea was probably from my fever, so I needed to get some of that acetaminophen down and keep it down. Instead of taking tablets, she gave me chewables for kids.
She then got me into my pajamas and into bed with my ice pack, and I tried to go to sleep.
The acetaminophen didn't even begin to touch the headache. The pain continued to deepen, and the fever got worse. Instead of feeling too hot, I began to chill. As the feeling of cold spread through my body, my joints all began to ache. I pulled all of my blankets onto me, thinking my fever was gone and my room was cold. I cracked my knuckles, my toes, and my back, but there was no relief. When Grandma came in to check on me, she found me miserable and in pain, shivering, and huddled under my blankets as if it were freezing in my room. She began to look worried, and went for the thermometer again, only to find that my mother had come home early because, as I heard her tell Grandma outside my door, she'd had a bad feeling.

The two women headed for the bathroom to get the thermometer, with Grandma explaining my symptoms on the way.
When they returned, my teeth were chattering. I couldn't make them stop, and each time they clacked together, a shockwave of pain flashed through my head, feeling as if someone were pounding on me with a big sledge hammer just like in cartoons. At this point the pressure in my head was so bad that I was seeing little sparkles and floaties in my vision. It literally looked like I was seeing the world through a veil of glitter and tiny, tiny bugs. My head felt too heavy to lift. I could picture my head ballooning out and in with each throb of the headache and clack of my teeth.

I didn't cry, though, because I had learned from having migraines that crying increases the pain.

There was no way Mom and Grandma were going to get an oral temperature with the way my teeth were chattering. Mom put the thermometer back in the blue case and went to get the other thermometer, the one in the red case. Knowing where that one was going, I rolled over and was about to remove my bottoms, when yet another wave of nausea hit. This time, nothing came up, but to my humiliation, I wet my bed a little during a heave. At twelve years old, this was a horribly undignified experience. I didn't know why I had lost muscle control in my bladder, only that I was too old to wet the bed. My embarrassment and shame at doing so nearly broke the control I had that kept the tears back. Mom had to shush my apology and assure me that it was because I was sick, and she understood.
She had me move to the bottom bed (I had a trundle) and while Grandma helped me change clothes and took my temperature, Mom changed my sheets. Despite their reassurances, I felt as though I had done something horrible. The tears really wanted to take over, but I had to be tough, because as bad as my head hurt, I didn't think I'd survive I let myself make it worse.

My fever was still very high, higher than it had ever been in my life. I do not know what the number was at that point, but it scared my mother and my grandmother.

A lot of what happened next is kind of fuzzy in my memory, but that is because I was delirious. I think the strangeness of the experience is what has fixed into my mind the details I do remember.
Everything looked and felt weird to me. Lights were blurry, and way too bright. Every single minor sound around me was both amplified and muffled at the same time, as if everything coming to my hears had been smudged so that I couldn't get the details. When I moved or turned my head, whatever I was looking at blurred and trailed along my vision, leaving lines of light and color. The room felt freezing, and so did everyone's hands. Though only my mother and my grandmother were there, I felt crowded and overstimulated, as though I was in a room full of talking people. They tried to cool me with damp cloths, but those felt like ice on my skin, so cold they literally burned, and I was unable to keep myself from crying out and shoving them off of me.
I remember some other strange things. It seemed like my room was really, really small, and my hands were huge. At one point, I was sure I saw someone standing outside my window looking in, and then I remembered that my room was on the second floor, but when I looked again, he was gone. The only thing outside was a tree branch. I remember closing my eyes because the distortion of my vision was making me sick again. My head pounded with pain and pressure, so much that despite my best attempts, tears finally leaked from my eyes. If the headache got worse, I couldn't tell you. It was really past the point of measurement.

To describe the pain as excruciating would still be an understatement. In my lifetime, I have had migraines lasting days, third degree burns, and broken bones, been electrocuted by a power line, been through traumatic labor ending in an emergency c-section, and had surgery. That headache was the worst physical pain I have ever had.

At some point, I was in my family doctor's office. That must have been the next morning, but Mom and Grandma were wearing the same clothes they had been wearing the night before, but I was in different pajamas. I recall realizing that if I was wearing different pajamas that must mean I'd had another accident, then hearing my mother telling the doctor I'd thrown up bile in the night. To this day I do not remember doing that. I later learned that was the reason for the change of clothes, and that if left unwashed, stomach acid and bile can eat through cotton overnight.

My doctor asked my Mom a bunch of questions, most of which are pretty normal for a kid with a cold, but one was really kind of odd. She asked if I had any bug bites.
I showed her the mosquito bite on my elbow, and her face became more serious. She and my grandmother exchanged a look, and she moved toward my feet.
I was laying on the doctor's table. She put her hands on my feet, and asked me to lift my head. I tried really, really hard, but I couldn't do it. It felt like I was trying to lift a truck with just the muscles in my neck.
My always chipper doctor became soft spoken rather quickly, as she turned to my Mom and Grandma. I didn't hear a lot of the discussion, but I picked up the parts they probably least wanted me to hear; something ending in -itis, and the words spinal tap, hospital, and immediately.

I remember everyone being way too chipper and positive with me after that. At the hospital, I was told I they were going to do a test to find out what was wrong so they could make it better. Everyone talked to me like I was five instead of twelve. I figured something must be very wrong, because that is how adults act in dire situations when they don't want the kids to know how bad their things are.
My mother and my grandmother, however, still seemed calm. They were neither overly cheerful, nor overly worried. I realize now that their calm came from Grandma's emergency room experience, the training she gave to Mom, their experiences with the children who brought about the beginning of the Hattie Larlham foundation, and not least, their faith in God. At the time, their levelheaded response to the situation kept me from being inspired to panic by everyone else's false cheer.

I was still really in a lot of pain. My head felt like it was going to explode. The pain was so bad, I almost wished that would happen. I've since wondered if this type of pressurized head pain was the trigger for the first uses of trepanning in neolithic times.
Bright as the lights at home had seemed to me, they were nothing in comparison to the hospital lights, and the sounds were overwhelming. One particularly lively nurse seemed to be personally drilling through my skull with her voice. I think she was lucky I couldn't sit up.

There was another doctor there. She was very pretty, smelled like some kind of perfume, and had a warm, genuine smile. She told me she was going to have to stick a needle in my back, and that I had to lay very, very still for this test, then asked if I understood. I remember telling her that I was not scared of needles because of my weekly allergy shots.
She had me roll over with my back to her. I don't think I was supposed to see the needle, but the nurse who brought it in carried it right past me. The needle was longer than any of my fingers, and it was attached to a tube that was as long as my forearm. I remember thinking that it wasn't the length of a needle that hurt, but the poke, so why would anyone think a longer needle would be a bigger deal?
The doctor told me that the needle was going into my spine, and that I had to lay still so that it wouldn't hit anything it shouldn't. Even though that sounded a little scary, I was pleased that she spoke to me as more of an adult, rather than the way everyone else was talking down to me.
I resolved to hold very still.
The needle going in didn't seem to hurt at all. Maybe it was because the pain in my head was so bad, but I barely felt the puncture, and was not aware that she had stuck me until it got pretty deep. Even then, I felt only cold and pressure, but no pain from the needle.
A spinal tap is a procedure used to extract an amount of cerebrospinal fluid for testing.
I did not know at the time, but I was being tested for Spinal Meningitis.

When the needle entered the stream of fluid, it shot out so hard it hit the wall behind the doctor with a loud splat. I heard a clink as she put something over the end of the tube, but was distracted from the rest of the procedure by another sensation - the relief of pressure in my head was immediate and dramatic. The headache didn't go away completely, but it went down quite a bit. I remember the nurses telling me how brave I was to face such a large needle, and I recall that my reply was about how much the procedure relieved the pain and pressure in my head.
I was put into a hospital bed after the spinal tap, and given an I.V. They had told me it would help my headache and I wouldn't feel so sick. After a short time, the medicine in it began to work, and I wasn't nauseous anymore. Though my head and joints still hurt, it wasn't as bad as it had been at home.
I was told to lay still for 8 hours. That was really easy, because I was exhausted, and went right to sleep.

While I was asleep, I had a strange dream about being in a tight tunnel, not quite tall enough to stand in. It was very dark in the tunnel, but bright at both ends. One end just had light, but the other had light and sound. I could hear Mom's voice coming from the end with sound. I could hear someone talking to my mother. A woman's voice told her that I had something called Encephalitis. She said that it was a virus, and then I heard the door open and close, and I couldn't hear them. For awhile there was only the sound of the T.V., and then I could hear Mom talking to me again.

There was an older guy with me in the tunnel. He said I couldn't get out of it, and that he had been stuck there for days. He told me that it got "thicker" near the lights, and I wouldn't be able to get through. I tried going toward the silent light, and found that what he said was true. When I got closer to it, it got harder to move, as if I were trying to move through water. The sensation of "thickening" was like trying to move through something like Jello, except not wet. It thinned in front of me, however, as soon as I turned to go back, though behind me still felt thick. That was when the dream stopped being strange and became scary, and I turned and ran toward my Mother's voice. As I got close to the edge of the tunnel I could see the hospital room around me. Mom was sitting beside my bed, holding my hand, reading out loud from a book.
Then I kind of jolted awake, back to the pain and pressure in my head, aching joints, fever, and chills. Somehow, those were much less scary than the dream. When I woke up, Mom got a nurse to come check on me. She looked at my eyes, checked my pulse and blood pressure, and took my temperature. She said my temperature was better. I remember thinking I could have told her that, because I could see right and I wasn't freezing.

After awhile, someone brought me a tray with broth, tea, crackers, and (irony of ironies) a container of Jello.
After I had slept a second time, I remember feeling well enough to read, even though my head still hurt.

I do not remember being told I was discharged, nor do I remember the drive home from the hospital, but they did send me home while I was still sick. After they had determined that the infection was viral, there wasn't a whole lot they could do at the hospital. The only thing I do remember, and I do think it was from when I was leaving, was going past the next room on the way out. When I left the hospital, a nurse had to wheel me out (yes, even in 1984 they were doing this for liability reasons) and it felt like she went pretty slow. I remember seeing that guy on my way out. He was a bit hard to recognize, but it was definitely his face. In the "dream" he had hair, but there wasn't a lot of it left when I saw him in his room. He was in a bed like mine, and had several machines in his room, one of which was beeping. There were tubes in his arm and his nose, and wires going into his shirt. There were other wires and tubes, but I couldn't tell where all of them went. There were people in his room, one of whom was a man who looked a lot like him.
A woman was holding his hand. She was also older, but didn't look like him. A nurse was talking to a younger adult whose face also looked like the face of the man in the bed. I remember hearing the word "Hospice" float out of the room... I noticed that word because I'd done a report on Hospice for school the previous year, so it was familiar, and I realized that the man must be dying. It felt like I was going past that room in slow motion, but it was really only long enough for that single but meaning-laden word to come out the door. Hearing it, I thought to myself that maybe he'd go to the other end of the tunnel. At the time, that thought made me feel better about the dream. I guess he got out of that tunnel, too.

My fever continued to spike. Once, I remember being sure that the cold war had I'd learned about in Social Studies had become literal. I warned my mother that the Russians were bombarding the US with ice, and we were all going to freeze to death.
I also had a long, in-dept conversation with Samwise from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Rings. I remember it was about vegetable gardening.

One night after I had started getting better, I got up to go to the bathroom, and totally lost all of my senses. It was the first night since I'd gotten sick that my mother was not sleeping in the room with me. We had all (my father, my brother, and me) insisted that she needed rest and should sleep in her own bed, and I would be fine. I'd been out of the hospital for weeks, and was hoping to go back to school soon.

My bedroom had heavy, quilted curtains to keep it totally dark. My mother made them herself. They were so thick they even acted as insulation from cold air leaking in through the windows.
I have always slept better in total darkness. However, it was winter, and so there were two lights in my room; one from the digital clock in my alarm clock/radio, the other from my little space-heater. It was the kind with a metal ribbon that heats up. The heater ribbon vibrated and turned bright orange when it got hot, giving off a fairly bright glow, and a steady buzzing noise.

When I stood to go to the bathroom, the pressure in my head flared suddenly and intensely. At the same time, a circle of darkness closed in on my vision, like an old T.V. shutting off, with the light of the heater winking out in the middle as the sound faded to nothing. To keep from falling, I grabbed the top of my bedpost with one hand, and then lost sensation in that, too. It was like a much, much bigger version of what happens when you are overtired and then you stand up too fast. For what felt like an eternity, I waited for everything to come back. I couldn't see, hear, or feel anything. It was like I was standing on nothing, touching nothing, experiencing total nothingness. I suppose sensory deprivation, when it is a chosen experience, is interesting, but when it is unchosen and unexplained it is very disturbing.

As the time stretched on, I began to worry, and then to panic. I had once read a novel entitled "Helen Keller's Teacher" and remembered that miss Keller's loss of hearing and sight had been attributed to her body reaching a high temperature during a bout with Scarlet Fever. I knew that my temperature had been measured at the hospital at over 105º F, and I began to be afraid that my senses were not ever going to come back, or that I might even be dead.
Just when I was on the verge of panic, I realized that I could smell the heater. It had a kind of burning dust smell to it when it got hot. As soon as I noticed that, I began to hear a sound that seemed to be coming from very far away. As it got a little bit closer, I recognized the buzzing of the vibrating heating filament. For a moment, the noise was still soft, then everything all rushed back in at once with kind of a roaring, whooshing sound in my ears, ending in a hard throb as my sense of the headache returned along with everything else. I still had a death grip on the top of my bedpost, but my knees were not going to hold out.
According to the numbers on my alarm clock, I had been standing there like that for a full 5 minutes.

I collapsed to the floor, but I still really had to pee. Remember, when your kid has a fever and has been throwing up, you push fluids. It felt like I could float to the bathroom. Remarkably, I had not lost bladder control during the loss of my senses. That made me feel a bit better about having lost control before.
Since I couldn't stand up, I crawled to our tiny upstairs bathroom and used the side of the tub as a brace to pull myself up into a sitting position so I could go.
I remember making the mistake of standing back up afterward, but the next memory after that is of my Dad finding me on the floor and carrying me back to my room. I had gone in there in the middle of the night, but it was getting light out when he found me.

I know that I was out of school for nearly a whole grading period (six weeks) with the virus. Friends brought schoolwork home for me, and with help from my parents, I kept up with what the class was learning. I didn't get all of the homework done, but I aced the tests. My grades weren't the best, but I passed everything except Phys-ed and Music classes, as those required participation, and I wasn't there.

By the time I returned to school, I was so underweight that one of the guys suggested that I'd come to school dressed as a skeleton and told me Halloween was over.

Even after I returned to school, there were strange symptoms. I was easily worn out, and it hurt to get too cold. My muscles were weaker, too, with less endurance before they would feel fatigued. I felt like I was starving. I can only imagine how much my parents must have spent on groceries that Spring! The weirdest symptoms, though, were mental. Sometimes it was as if my brain had temporarily slowed down, and other times things happened that I can only describe as glitches, like in a computer. I can remember having to set my clothes out for the next day at night, always on the same chair, and always having to change into my pajamas next to the hamper. That way, I had a clue to remember whether I was getting ready for school or bed. Otherwise, I would spend half an hour repeatedly taking off and putting back on the same article of clothing before I remembered what I was doing.

For weeks, getting ready for school took about two hours, instead of the 20 minutes it had taken me every morning before the virus. I was constantly either forgetting what I was doing, or getting hung up on a single detail and focusing on only that until I was interrupted by a family member.

In class, I had trouble answering questions if the answer had any complexity. I'd forget what I was talking about and wander off into other verbal territory, or get my words mixed up. I called people and objects by the wrong names, got turned around and went the wrong way in the halls, etc.

Slowly those symptoms diminished until I got mostly back to normal, but I still do occasionally have what my friends refer to as blond or senior moments. One weird one that remains with me to this day is word substitution. I might mean to ask if my son has his homework done, but instead I ask if he's finished his jacket.. We laugh, and move on each time, and I know why it happens, but it still bothers me.

Another is the fatigue and phantom pain, particularly muscle pain, but also joint pain in the morning, and stiffness throughout the day. I still get forgetful a lot if I am not making a concentrated effort to not be. Testing has demonstrated that I haven't lost cognitive ability, but sometimes it seems like it because I can be so scatterbrained.
I've got a diagnosis of Fibromyalgia Syndrome, but I have never been sure that the symptoms which got me diagnosed as such are not actually just lingering gifts from my little friend the bug.

Still, it could have been much, much worse. There were 11 cases of the same virus in my county that year, and I know that at least one person died from it. The danger to children and the elderly is greater than to healthy young adults, and with my severe asthma, I did not have a strong immune system to begin with. Still, I survived the experience.

It was not my first near-death experience, nor was it my last... just the only one caused by a tiny little bug... but I won because I squished the bug when she bit me, and I am still here.

In 1984, they didn't give us a name for the virus. They just said it caused a condition called encephalitis. There is nothing I've been able to research online that causes encephalitis, and only has an hour incubation period. It may be that the infection progressed so quickly in me partly because of my mosquito bite allergy, or perhaps because my immune system was compromised by my severe asthma. I'd also been ill recently, an annual occurrence during my childhood. Every year, I had at least one respiratory infection, also probably due to my asthma.
I would be interested to know if anyone else knows of a virus or bacterial infection that can be transmitted by mosquitoes and has such a short incubation period that, upon infection of an individual with a weakened immune system, could manifest overt symptoms within the first hour as this infection did with me.

The Nutcase Files

Sunday, June 26, 2011

U.S. Veteran Faces Legal Action for Flying American Flag

Sunday, June 5, 2011

How one mosquito nearly killed me.

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