Valentine's Day
Today was Valentine's Day so I stopped to pick up a dozen roses, some candy and a card for Sheila as I was driving back home from another medical appointment. Sheila seemed to be pleasantly surprised by the gifts when I arrived home.
My health has been so lousy with COVID since before Christmas that we sort of skipped Christmas, our anniversary, New Year's, and even a long weekend out of town with friends. It has been a period of nothingness, overwhelming fatigue, pain and lousy health.
I had a medical appointment this morning while Sheila worked from home which provided me with an ideal opportunity to get a few things to show my love and appreciation for Sheila. As I said, I believe she was pleasantly surprised and thankful!
I've tested positive for mononucleosis three times in my adult life (which is the Epstein-Barr virus). The first time was bad enough to land me in the hospital for a few weeks.
I was in isolation, shivering, my organs shutting down, with a nurse at my bedside constantly. I awoke in the middle of the night one night, shivering due to a high fever, nurse at my bedside holding my hand with tears in her eyes while the Chaplain was administering my Last Rites at the foot of my bed. I didn't have much energy to expend by talking out loud but in my head I was saying, "oh... hell no... I'm not ready for that!" I vividly remember the darkened room, feeling like I was in a freezer, my head was killing me, my kidneys hurt more than I could imagine, my throat felt like I had swallowed razor blades.
Over the next couple of weeks, my IV was moved from arm to arm and then hand to hand. They kept moving the IV due to extreme swelling at the site. They drew blood from me every morning at sunrise. My arms were completely bruised from mid-bicep to mid-forearm. Fortunately, I was friends with most of the nurses so they took good care of me. Many months later, I would learn that the nurse who stayed at my bedside while in isolation was someone from Lynbrook, a town right next door to my hometown of Rockville Centre. I suppose she saw my hometown in my records and my records were also classified as, generally speaking, "he doesn't exist" so she felt she should stick with me rather than let me suffer all alone.
My roommate had called my parents to let them know that I was in the hospital simply as a common courtesy. He found my unconscious body after two days and called for help. The medics brought me back to consciousness but I thought it was two days prior because that was the last day I was conscious. I refused to get on the gurney so they each grabbed an arm and helped me get to my transport. When we arrived at the hospital, I again refused the gurney... the nurses who grabbed my arms were friends of mine and immediately commented that I was burning up just by holding me up by my arms.
After hearing from my roommate, my parents called the Air Force hospital where I was located but they were told I was not there. Due to my status, as I said above, I didn't exist to anyone who inquires about me so my parents were left in the dark until I was well enough to call them (this was the era of pay phones so communication was not as instantaneous nor easy to find like today). I don't think I called them until I was discharged from the hospital.
As expected, my parents were not too happy during the time I was in the hospital. When I finally spoke with them, I explained that the cause of them being left in the dark was not due to ineptness... I couldn't tell them the truth about why I was classified in this way but I didn't want them to think I was working with a bunch of fools. I simply explained they were just doing their job and that there was some small administrative error in my medical records related to a previous duty. (More than a decade or two later, after I retired, my dad and I finally discussed my career over a few beers so I did finally explain that situation to him.)
After leaving the hospital, it took about six months of grueling work, physical therapy, aerobic exercise and body-building exercise to recover. I even traveled across the country to Lake Placid to add paddling and climbing the high peaks surrounding Lake Placid to my recovery. I still vividly remember the hardest part of the recovery being the painful swollen lymph nodes and the difficulty in keeping my eyes open past sunset. I was weighing in at 128 lbs when I left the hospital. In the following six months, I put on 60 lbs of muscle.
As such, I look at my life since that time as a gift... a free-bee. I was 23 years old at the time so this has been quite a big and lengthy gift albeit being a lengthy time of one catastrophe after another, for the most part, considering my extensive spinal injuries and daily pain, losing my career, and then developing a completely different incurable disease. I lived life as though there would be no tomorrow in many respects which probably added to some of the catastrophes in the following decades. My closest friends would always say I lived for having a bullseye on my back which, of course, was more of a metaphor for how I lived my life.
Now, after years of struggling with lingering "long-COVID" (since 2020) while dealing with an incurable illness and latent Epstein-Barr virus as well as extensive spinal injuries, I suspect that this new insidious virus will eventually also lie latent in the body waiting for my body to show some weakness or vulnerability which will allow it to take control of my health and knock me down again... and again, with the Epstein-Barr virus lending a hand.
Quite the "Valentine's Day" blog entry, huh?
Love you! ❤️
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