Castie

My husband and I had been planning for months to fly his parents to Germany. See, years and years ago they were kind enough to help us out with our wedding granting us a small sum of cash on which we modestly married. We thought it would be kind to repay their loving favor by giving them a vacation of a lifetime. We bought their plane tickets, sent them packing lists, mad a budget with them, and planned the entire vacation which would be roughly 3 weeks long.

Well, we obviously had to plan my surgery around this vacation. Believe it or not, I had my surgery 2 1/2 weeks before they arrived. I was still entirely miserable and recovery was going hard and things just kept getting worse.

Three days before we were to pick up my in-laws, my husband took me to Dr. P.'s office to get a cast. The girls putting on my cast didn't speak hardly any English, so I was relegated to the duty to notify her if the casting was too tight or too loose. Those words were 'eng' and 'weit'. Putting on the cast wasn't easy. It kept getting too tight, so she'd have to loosen the material and cotton and start over. I didn't get a choice in color (like you would expect in America) so I had this basic blue clunker which I dubbed castie.

It was actually much easier to bathe with castie since all we had to do was tie plastic bags around my arm and tuck them in really tight so the cast wouldn't get wet. Of course, my husband still had to do all the washing but I started to help more now that I wasn't holding up the rubber arm.

The day before my in-laws hit the Frankfurt tarmac, I came down with a vicious fever. I have never had a fever like this in my life. I was doing my usual afternoon routine of lying on the couch and watching a movie when it really hit. I'd been feeling terrible all morning, and when my husband came home, I migrated from the bedroom to the couch with all my fluffy German pillows and down comforters. It's a Friday afternoon and I didn't have any obligations as I had already finished my schoolwork and I had canceled giving piano lessons until January.

It was around lunch time when I began to feel like I was in a sauna. We had huge windows in our living room, but it wasn't really a sunny day and it was December in an area on the same latitude as Calgary, Canada. Needless to say it was cold and there was snow on the ground. Our ambient floor heating never worked very well, so I knew something was wrong.

Of course, being the worrywart I've always been, I began to imagine something was terribly wrong with my arm. I have metal allergies, what if my body was rejecting the titanium? What if I have an infection? I realized by 3pm that day I had spent 8 hours unable to breathe and in an intense feverish state. I began to panic. I couldn't swallow, I couldn't eat, I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't get cool enough even after I opened up the windows to the winter air. I debated for about an hour whether or not to call the lady who lived a few blocks away who brought her children for lessons every Monday afternoon. I finally had to decide against calling her because I wasn't sure if this was an emergency, and she would be out at the Heidelberg Kaserne (military post) picking her kids up from school.

At 3pm I gave up and woke my husband up. I told him I'd tried to get my fever down but I didn't know if there was something wrong with my arm. My temperature kept reading 107 degrees and I wasn't able to breathe or swallow. He checked me out for himself and decided that we should go to the emergency clinic at the Heidelberg American hospital.

Well, that stupid castie got in the way for sure. We sped as fast as we could on the Autobahn to get to the hospital in time for the emergency clinic to see me before they closed. We told the doctors I'd just had surgery and that I was suffering symptoms similar to what I was told to watch for when it came to infections. Now, I know I was delirious. I was really on another planet. I was horrified to find out that after telling them about my 107 degree fever that had already lasted 8 hours was only a really bad flu. I think they wanted to laugh at me.

Fabulous.

I really thought something was really wrong. But, they kept assuring me that it was better safe than sorry. Then, they tried to send me away. I sat in the waiting room while they were trying to release me in absolute discomfort. I was pale, shaky; I couldn't breathe and couldn't stay warm or cool enough. A nurse came out to check on me about 30 minutes later and said that I was much too miserable to send home in the state I was in.

Thank God!

They took me back again and I told them I wasn't able to eat or drink anything all day because I was so miserable and that I'd had the fever all morning. They put me on a saline drip, drugged me up with Motrin, Tylenol and Sudafed, and then let me sit through 2 liters of saline before they sent me home with a bunch of medicine to keep me fever free.

Of course, the entire time I was at the hospital, my husband was hanging over a chair passed out. Since there weren't any other serious patients at the hospital, one of the nurses rolled a bed over by mine and let my husband sleep on it. He got about an hour of sleep which was really nice of the nurse to allow him. I made them check me for bronchitis before we left because I had just recovered recently from a bad bronchial infection that lasted 3 months, and with my family's history of severe bronchitis, I wanted to be safe.

I don't know what to think about this hospital visit really, because I was so delirious. I don't even know if I'm remembering it correctly. I do know, however, that I was scared out of my mind. I've had family members with MRSA infections, so I know the severity or infection and contamination. It's frightening to think that if something had gone wrong; my arm could have gone gangrenous. I'm lucky in many ways, but I think the flu that day was the best diagnosis I'd had that year.