[WARNING: don't read this if you are about to eat]
Ok so last week was pretty much a write-off.
I picked up a cold, probably from one of the children somewhere in the network of cousins, neighbours or school friends of my own boys. Either way I had a bad head cold which suddenly got a lot worse.
Old fashioned remedies
I went in to work early in the week but felt really lousy so the middle of the week was a mix of staying in bed and working at the desk in my home office, progressively feeling more and more congested with the cold.
I started out with the old reliable Lemsip. It was of no help this time as the cold took hold in my head behind my nose and the pain in my jaws increased. I then moved on to try the old steam and Olbas oil remedy, immersing myself in a steam cloud to see if it would relieve some of the blockage in my sinus. That too was of no use.
By thursday afternoon I was in real pain. My left ear was blocked up and the whole left side of my head was in real pain. I had a steadily growing pain in my left ear caused by pressure in my sinuses and nothing seemed to be helping. There was only one thing for it. Bed.
Pop, click, bleed
By 10pm I was in bed, lying down and hoping/praying that a good night's sleep would do the trick. By 10:15 I realised that this might have been over-optimistic as the pain increased. By 10:30 I was in such pain that I would have gladly accepted a bullet in the head. The pain rose and rose in my left ear to a point that was unbearable and then it happened.
A loud pop, a loud click and then the sensation of something running down the side of my head. I sat up in the bed, my ear still aching painfully, and applied a tissue to my ear. Blood and some other fluid mixed and trickling out of my ear. Great.
Few drinks
I went back downstairs, by this time slightly thrown by the mixture of fluids emanating from my ear. The original plan was to address the issue of not being able to sleep. I thought a couple of Limoncellos would do the trick. That of course was before the whole ear discharge scenario started to unfold.
My wife sat there on the next chair looking at me dabbing the blood and pus from the side of my head. I explained my brilliant Limoncello plan to her and she looked at me as if I had gone completely insane. I realise now that it was not such a great plan.
Get this guy to the emergency room, stat!
So it seemed to make sense to get this 'blood and other fluids pouring from the ear' checked out, just in case it was some of my brains leaking out or whatever.
My wife drove me to the emergency room of Saint Vincent's hospital in Dublin. It goes to show how long it has been since I last went there that the emergency room was now on the other end of the hospital. On the way my wife asked me if I knew where the emergency room was and I of course said I did. What I meant of course was 'I did 10 years ago'. Anyway I registered with the guy at the reception. They operate a triage system basically meaning that you'll be attended to according to the severity of your injury. Thankfully there weren't a whole load of people waiting so I was seen pretty quickly.
But with this triage approach you might be 'called' several times, each time with a different set of things going on. This is pretty much what happened on the night with the first call being to ask me some questions about what happened, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much pain was I in and all that kind of general stuff. The second call was to take a blood sample and the third call was to finally get seen by a doctor.
A long night
I think we arrived at the emergency room just before midnight and I think I was finally seen by a doctor around 5 am. To be fair the treatment I received from the staff was superb and they were going as fast as they could. Once I went through the triage area into the treatment area I could see the place was full so they really did have their hands full.
I was relieved when a doctor finally came to see me. That relief turned to anxiety when he took me into a procedure room and started wheeling in scary-looking equipment he said he was going to use to examine me. Thankfully I was half-asleep at this stage, having spent a sum total of 30 minutes in bed that night, and had also taken some painkillers given to me by the triage nurse. So when he put a little metal funnel into my ear and started jabbing my ear drum with some little plastic sticks it was painful but I was so knackered that I couldn't muster the energy to complain.
The verdict
Pretty much as I suspected, the pressure from all the gunk inside my ear had built up to such an extent that it made my ear-drum tear, hence the high pain followed by the loud pop. It was not fun. The stuff leaking from my ear was a mix of gunk from inside the ear, blood from the tear, and some yuk fluid leaking from the infection around the tear.
The doctor prescribed some antibiotics to kill the infection inside the sinus to reduce the build up of more gunk, an anti-inflammatory pill to reduce the swelling in the ear, and some other stuff to relieve the pain in the general area of the left-side of my head.
I checked out of the hospital at 5:30am and by this time my wife had gone home to get some sleep. The nurse asked me an hour previous if she should send her home and I thought it made sense, especially since she was still planning to do the school run for our boys that same morning. So I was glad that she had gone home to get some sleep.
I wandered around to find an ATM, Grabbed a cup of coffee from an all-night shop and took a taxi home, arriving just as the boys were getting up for school.
Getting back to normal
It's Monday now, soon to be Tuesday and the sinus infection is starting to clear a little. I won't go into how I know that to be true. The only problem is the antibiotic pills are making me unwell in the stomach of you know what I mean. I've been sprinting to the bathroom a fair bit of Saturday and Sunday and my stomach sounds like Jabba the Hut with indigestion.
Not good and not conducive to going back to work. I was back and forth all night on Sunday night between bed and toilet and this wrecked me. So today I visited the doctor and he changed my prescription.
Tomorrow I'm heading back into work and hopefully I'll be back on the straight and narrow from here on. The ear has stopped leaking disgusting fluids too which is nice.
Hopefully there will be some time to revert to more normal content for the blog this week. Now you know why nothing has been written here for the last little while.
Ok so last week was pretty much a write-off.
I picked up a cold, probably from one of the children somewhere in the network of cousins, neighbours or school friends of my own boys. Either way I had a bad head cold which suddenly got a lot worse.
Old fashioned remedies
I went in to work early in the week but felt really lousy so the middle of the week was a mix of staying in bed and working at the desk in my home office, progressively feeling more and more congested with the cold.
I started out with the old reliable Lemsip. It was of no help this time as the cold took hold in my head behind my nose and the pain in my jaws increased. I then moved on to try the old steam and Olbas oil remedy, immersing myself in a steam cloud to see if it would relieve some of the blockage in my sinus. That too was of no use.
By thursday afternoon I was in real pain. My left ear was blocked up and the whole left side of my head was in real pain. I had a steadily growing pain in my left ear caused by pressure in my sinuses and nothing seemed to be helping. There was only one thing for it. Bed.
Pop, click, bleed
By 10pm I was in bed, lying down and hoping/praying that a good night's sleep would do the trick. By 10:15 I realised that this might have been over-optimistic as the pain increased. By 10:30 I was in such pain that I would have gladly accepted a bullet in the head. The pain rose and rose in my left ear to a point that was unbearable and then it happened.
A loud pop, a loud click and then the sensation of something running down the side of my head. I sat up in the bed, my ear still aching painfully, and applied a tissue to my ear. Blood and some other fluid mixed and trickling out of my ear. Great.
Few drinks
I went back downstairs, by this time slightly thrown by the mixture of fluids emanating from my ear. The original plan was to address the issue of not being able to sleep. I thought a couple of Limoncellos would do the trick. That of course was before the whole ear discharge scenario started to unfold.
My wife sat there on the next chair looking at me dabbing the blood and pus from the side of my head. I explained my brilliant Limoncello plan to her and she looked at me as if I had gone completely insane. I realise now that it was not such a great plan.
Get this guy to the emergency room, stat!
So it seemed to make sense to get this 'blood and other fluids pouring from the ear' checked out, just in case it was some of my brains leaking out or whatever.
My wife drove me to the emergency room of Saint Vincent's hospital in Dublin. It goes to show how long it has been since I last went there that the emergency room was now on the other end of the hospital. On the way my wife asked me if I knew where the emergency room was and I of course said I did. What I meant of course was 'I did 10 years ago'. Anyway I registered with the guy at the reception. They operate a triage system basically meaning that you'll be attended to according to the severity of your injury. Thankfully there weren't a whole load of people waiting so I was seen pretty quickly.
But with this triage approach you might be 'called' several times, each time with a different set of things going on. This is pretty much what happened on the night with the first call being to ask me some questions about what happened, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much pain was I in and all that kind of general stuff. The second call was to take a blood sample and the third call was to finally get seen by a doctor.
A long night
I think we arrived at the emergency room just before midnight and I think I was finally seen by a doctor around 5 am. To be fair the treatment I received from the staff was superb and they were going as fast as they could. Once I went through the triage area into the treatment area I could see the place was full so they really did have their hands full.
I was relieved when a doctor finally came to see me. That relief turned to anxiety when he took me into a procedure room and started wheeling in scary-looking equipment he said he was going to use to examine me. Thankfully I was half-asleep at this stage, having spent a sum total of 30 minutes in bed that night, and had also taken some painkillers given to me by the triage nurse. So when he put a little metal funnel into my ear and started jabbing my ear drum with some little plastic sticks it was painful but I was so knackered that I couldn't muster the energy to complain.
The verdict
Pretty much as I suspected, the pressure from all the gunk inside my ear had built up to such an extent that it made my ear-drum tear, hence the high pain followed by the loud pop. It was not fun. The stuff leaking from my ear was a mix of gunk from inside the ear, blood from the tear, and some yuk fluid leaking from the infection around the tear.
The doctor prescribed some antibiotics to kill the infection inside the sinus to reduce the build up of more gunk, an anti-inflammatory pill to reduce the swelling in the ear, and some other stuff to relieve the pain in the general area of the left-side of my head.
I checked out of the hospital at 5:30am and by this time my wife had gone home to get some sleep. The nurse asked me an hour previous if she should send her home and I thought it made sense, especially since she was still planning to do the school run for our boys that same morning. So I was glad that she had gone home to get some sleep.
I wandered around to find an ATM, Grabbed a cup of coffee from an all-night shop and took a taxi home, arriving just as the boys were getting up for school.
Getting back to normal
It's Monday now, soon to be Tuesday and the sinus infection is starting to clear a little. I won't go into how I know that to be true. The only problem is the antibiotic pills are making me unwell in the stomach of you know what I mean. I've been sprinting to the bathroom a fair bit of Saturday and Sunday and my stomach sounds like Jabba the Hut with indigestion.
Not good and not conducive to going back to work. I was back and forth all night on Sunday night between bed and toilet and this wrecked me. So today I visited the doctor and he changed my prescription.
Tomorrow I'm heading back into work and hopefully I'll be back on the straight and narrow from here on. The ear has stopped leaking disgusting fluids too which is nice.
Hopefully there will be some time to revert to more normal content for the blog this week. Now you know why nothing has been written here for the last little while.
1 comment:
Oh no! I hope you are feeling better very soon - that sounds like a nightmare of an illness... Good wishes coming your way.
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