After jinxing myself for months having not fell ill ever since I had moved to Ahmedabad for work, my body finally accepted the challenge and put me to a halt. I had no idea of any lingering symptoms, just on one random day as I came back from work and went to bed after washing up, my body turned up the heat and along with it came the ever dreadful pain.
After a futile attempt to tame the illness for 2 days with OTC meds, I decided to call my colleague from work and a very good friend to take to me a hospital. I am lucky to have made good friends in this city, because when he finally arrived after this shift, I was not in the condition to get out of the bed on my own. The body pain was crazy and the fever was ever present.
The hospital did some blood work and found my platelets disappearing into thin air and admitted me to the ICU. I was in the hospital for a total of 5 days, shifted to a special observation ward after initial 2 days. I am going to put my mind to work and recall everything that happened during these days and the stuff I cooked up in my brain.
I am all well now, and while my platelets dipped to 80K in the initial couple of days, I have now made a full recovery and doing well. Dengue fever is horrendous and I despise mosquitoes more than ever now.
You don't want to be a in hospital
While I myself made the decision to go to a hospital in the first place and was determined to get admitted if it was required, the moment my treatment began, it hit me that I did not want to be there. "Why medicines aren't enough?" "Do they really need to insert this IV in my body?" "I am sick and will get worse surrounded by all the bacteria that call this hospital their home."
Thoughts like this and even crazier ran through my head when the first IV was inserted in my body. The hospital that looked a good option when I was lingering on my bed suddenly became a place I abhorred when the treatment began.
It is interesting how the brain works. The functions worked through to judge that the situation required professional attention and as soon as the professionals started to administer the treatment, the mind did a full 360 and said "nope."
Thoughts, a lot of them
This is in no way to say going to a hospital was a disservice. It's just that between the hours the nurse came in the room to check in on me and left, I was bored out of my mind. There was absolutely nothing to do, except lie down on my bed and think. Hospitals are perhaps one of the only few place where people do not need to confront themselves to think. It comes naturally to the brain. I did a lot of thinking and self-talk when I had nothing to do except, sleep.
Sleep, sleep, and sleep
I cannot fathom the number of hours I slept while I was in the hospital. All I did was sleep. I was fast asleep the entire 5 days except when I was not in the washroom fighting my OCD washing hands or when my friend came to check-in on me during dinner time.
After months of work, I think I truly slept the "sleep" inside of me which needed to sleep. It felt good. I was refreshed every morning I woke up albeit still disappointed with the IV inserted in my hand. It also appears that the trip to the hospital seems to have fixed my sleep schedule. I now sleep better after work and the general weariness is now gone as well.
Empathy
I have never been admitted in a hospital for this long and thus the time I had also allowed me to observe the behavior people carry in such a place.
The single most obvious behavior I noticed was everybody being empathetic, magnitudes more than I have ever observed it on the streets, at work, or anywhere else people gather together. There is something which makes people care and look after others in a way they wouldn't in any other setting. Apart from the doctors and the nurses which are professionally trained to act and behave that way (50% of their work is probably just understanding human psychology when administrating treatment) I was surprised to see the general staff and other patients being so helpful and looking out for others.
May be this is due to the fact that while a hospital carries a negative sentiment (only sick go there), the people themselves come with a positive attitude to get better and have another shot at life. This makes them extra empathetic, however this observation may also be clouded by my own judgement of how people behave (may be the goodness I saw in the people there was because they were actually good people and it was their general attitude).
I make this point regarding empathy because I came across a nurse who came off as rude (after my discharge I was asked to come to the hospital for 2 extra days for IV and there was a nurse who seemed very disinterested) and if I met them outside of the hospital, I wouldn't mind the rudeness at all because it is expected, but to be like that in a hospital was a little off-putting to me, since I had experienced so much better from everybody else.
Doctors and nurses are overworked
For the first time in my life, I had both the opportunity and the time to observe doctors and nurses from up close. Apart from the one doctor under whose consultation I was admitted and who made one round of visit every morning, every other doctor and nurse I saw was visibly exhausted. Their eyes, the way they motioned, and the way they talked to one another, all of it reflected to me how tired they were.
One of the nurses even mentioned this fact to a general staffer in the ICU on my first night there. Something along the lines of "I have been here working since the last 2 days and you say you are tired while being here for a few hours at max."
Doctors and nurses deserve better pay and more regulated hours. This is not even an argument for me anymore. It was a private hospital and while I do not know how things work in a public hospital, I did observe that doctors and nurses fared much better when I was caring for my father in a hospital last year.
I don't expect the policy-makers to be competent enough to work on this, especially if this is just restricted to the private hospitals, however I hope there is a positive change on the horizon soon.
Life is fragile
I knew this for a fact, however now that I have gone through something like this myself, my outlook towards life had indeed changed. It is always better to go through some pain and let professionals fix our bodies. Getting another shot at life and seeing another day is a blessing so I thank all the professionals and the science they did to fix me.
PS: I said "better to go through some pain" because for the first couple of days when I was being administered IV, it was very painful and I made up my mind to not go through with it and demanded my friend and the nurse to remove it. I had to be convinced by the nurses and ultimately my mother on the call to change my mind. It all worked out in the end.
Tagged: Life Updates
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