few years ago I temporarily got into a tradition of massive annual sinus infections. Thankfully that phase of my life has come and gone, but while it was going I was in abject misery for a few weeks every year.
The first episode was especially bad because I thought it was just a cold and would eventually go away on its own. Why go to a doctor? That all changed when, during the height of that first annual ordeal, we took a trip to Nashville. During the interstate climb over Tennessee’s Monteagle Mountain, I was 100% convinced my head was going to explode. I do not mean metaphorically. I mean literally. My wife had been forced to take the wheel miles back, and I was begging her to find a hospital. Run people off the road if you have to, I said. Before we saw a blue H sign, we had descended from the heights and my head no longer felt in imminent danger of detonation.
Back home in Augusta, I finally realized medical intervention was necessary and thus learned the difference between a cold and a sinus infection.
Treatment became routine. Every year I visited a doctor and got a prescription for some high-powered infection killer. One day I woke up during an especially wretched sinus adventure. “Where is that medicine?” I said, ready for the day’s first dose of a pill from a bottle with bold black letters on a fluorescent orange label reading, “TAKE WITH FOOD OR MILK.” I swallowed a pill without water and then laid back — just for a moment until a wave of nausea went away. Instead, I fell into a sound sleep and woke up more than an hour later.
My intention had been to chase the pill with a piece of dry toast within just a few minutes, but that ship had sailed. To my raging sinus infection and waves of nausea, I had added an atom-splitting headache, easily a 9.3 on the Richter Scale. It was like Monteagle all over again. If I moved my head off the pillow so much as a half centimeter, ice picks and chainsaws and sledgehammers pummeled what was left of my brain.
At some point, my long-suffering wife responded to my groans and came into the bedroom to, I presume, watch my death throes. Through my delirium I commanded her to call the doctor’s office. She did so and came back with their instructions, quote: “Press 1.” Ha ha. Just kidding. Actually, they told her to get my carcass to the office ASAP. Of course, this would require moving my head off the pillow far more than half a centimeter (see above), so I wasn’t optimistic, but I tried. It was not easy. First, I tried a full centimeter. Then two. Eventually, I got all the way off the pillow and into the car in the fetal position for the trip to the doctor’s office.
They put me in a room right way, thankfully. By this time I was feeling considerably better, although the headache was still about a 7.1 and I was still feeling nauseated. The doctor came in soon enough and got right in my face to look down my throat with a tongue depressor and shine a light in my pupils. This esteemed ear, nose and throat specialist — a name I guarantee you know — had obviously just finished smoking a cigarette before entering the room. For the record, cigarette breath is not my favorite aroma under the best of circumstances. In the state I was in at that moment, it took all my considerable resolve not to barf in his face.
He took my history starting with the moment I woke up and took the pill, including the fact that I wound up taking it on an empty stomach. He was puzzled. “You haven’t had any reactions from this medicine before?” None. “It’s unusual to develop anaphylaxis mid-stream,” he said, “but not unheard of. Discard the rest of those and I’ll write a prescription for a different drug.”
He left, but the nurse stayed in the room with me. She tactfully and respectfully suggested the obvious: the entire episode was the result of failing to take the pill with food or milk. I took the remaining pills as prescribed, didn’t fill the new prescription, and lived happily ever after — until the next year’s attack.
To that nurse (whose name I do not know), I say a most sincere and heartfelt thank you.
Thanks to nurses everywhere, this week and every week.
by Dan Pearson. This article previously appeared in the May 3, 2013 issue of the Augusta Medical Examiner. If you have a great nurse story, please send it to Dan@AugustaRx.com
