It seems like this is how half of my posts start off, but things got pretty serious this week.

Since my last hospitalization, I’ve been taking scheduled medications (mostly painkillers) twenty-four hours a day, so I’m typically awake off and on throughout the night. Early Wednesday morning I took my normal medication in the middle of the night and felt normal (well, as normal as I have been lately).

Then, around 6am, I woke up and everything felt wrong. I don’t know how to specifically describe how I felt other than that it was very, very wrong. I felt a little like I needed to vomit, and a little like I needed to lay down and pass out, but nothing I did helped get rid of an urgent sense of something inside me being very out of order.

The worst part is when my wife, Haley, tried to communicate with me. I could not communicate. I’m going to repeat that for emphasis: I could not communicate. She would ask me very simple questions, like “What’s wrong?” and I would not be able to form a sentence to reply. The most complete thought I could put together was something along the lines of:

“I… the. There’s a… No.”

Reading this now it sounds like a joke or something silly, but it was one of the scariest moments of my life. I’m a smart, capable 40-year old man and not only was there something seriously wrong with me that I couldn’t identify, but I had completely lost the ability to communicate.

It was just as scary for Haley, watching her husband instantly lose the ability to communicate. Despite her terror, she made the exact right decision and called an ambulance. My memory isn’t 100% on what happened the following few hours, but I remember the ambulance arriving and the EMTs gently convincing me to board the ambulance despite my protests that I was feeling better (I was not feeling better).

We arrived at St. Luke’s East, the hospital I’ve spent most of the previous six months at, and my disorientation continued. Nurses would ask me a question and I would repeat the question back to them, or ask them something else about an unrelated topic. I attempted several times to get a drink of water from my disposable urinal. When the hospital staff asked me what was wrong I was again completely unable to articulate what was happening to me. Luckily Haley arrived and was able to give the staff some actual useful information about what was happening.

The very early initial diagnosis was that I had a serious infection, possibly pneumonia. I mostly remember sitting frozen at the edge of my bed feeling hot and thirsty. If I remember properly, it was around this point we saw that I had yet another fever, this one over 103 degrees.

After several hours of having fluids, antibiotics, and other medications pumped into me, I started to get my faculties back and began to be able to form sentences. Luckily, we had previously scheduled a trip for my father Paul to come out and visit during the month of December, and his arrival happened to coincide perfectly with this hospital stay. He’ll be able to lend a hand with the kids and chores around the house, which is going to be an enormous help.

Finally, late in the afternoon, after spending approximately eight hours waiting in an ER room, a patient room opened up in the hospital proper. So I was moved there and have been mostly sleeping and going through tests that I’ll elaborate on in a future posts.

The view from my current hospital room, which is the best I’ve had yet.

For now, It’s enough to know the following:

• I had a very scary moment Wednesday morning.
• I am back in the hospital and improving.
• The current diagnosis is a bad infection involving my lungs.
• Thanks to my wife, and the staff at St. Luke’s East, I’m going to be okay.

Now I’m going to go back and get some rest. I love you all, and please feel free to drop a line in the comments if you’d like to talk.