Home from the hospital. Thanks for all your good wishes. I was only sort of sick for a couple of weeks, then after the eardrum problem the pneumonia went from zero to sixty in about four hours. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, blood pressure going crazy, my fever was way up – I couldn’t even walk. Crazy! Also, the clue (that I should remember from my previous, less serious pneumonia cases) – coughing up blood. If you are coughing up anything striped with blood, go to the doctor immediately. Do not pass go. That seems like a no-brainer, but when it first happened to me as a college student, I didn’t think anything about it. Also, if you are asthmatic, um, don’t catch pneumonia.
PS – People with autoimmune problems often have reactions to their IVs. I did! Yeah, you don’t want that.
In an attempt to be educational about my health excitements, here is a bit about the class of antibiotics they gave me via IV at the hospital for the last couple of days. Mine was called Rocephin, which sounds like “rose-fin.” Anyway, a little about the mysterious origins of today’s antibiotic-of-the-week, courtesty of Wikipedia:
“Cephalosporin compounds were first isolated from cultures of Cephalosporium acremonium from a sewer in Sardinia in 1948 by Italian scientist Giuseppe Brotzu [2]. He noticed that these cultures produced substances that were effective against Salmonella typhi, the cause of typhoid fever…”
Thank you, sewage! Another strong antibiotic, called Vancomycin, was discovered, I believe, in a kind of rainforest mud.
Interestingly, the doctors told me they were almost sure I had viral pneumonia; but gave me IV antibiotics anyway, and, again interestingly, they did seem to help.
Thanks again ya’ll for your encouraging words…Too sick to talk on the phone, still – I just start coughing when I walk across the room or have a fine-minute conversation. Not sure how long this phase lasts, but I hope not long. I want to try to get back to teaching work and regular life asap. Meanwhile, looking forward to catching up on sleep and trying to avoid hurting myself coughing – ow, my ribs, ow, my lower back, ow, ow ow! (Please leave any helpful tips for painful coughs in the comments 🙂 – I’m allergic to the ingredients in most cough syrups, including guafinisin and codeine, so all advice about how to control a cough without them welcome!)
I hope to soon be blogging about poetry (and more healthy circumstances) soon.
- At June 09, 2009
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Pneumonia
14
This is Glenn. Think good thoughts for Jeannine; she was admitted to the hospital tonight with pneumonia. She is stabile now and resting.
Update: Hey guys! It’s Jeannine, finally healthy enough to be sending an update from the patchy hospital wireless, but wanted to say thank you for all the well-wishes and let you know I’m still in the hospital, waiting to hear from doctors on exactly what’s up with the pneumonia and hoping I can go home soon! I really appreciate your good thoughts and prayers. I finally got a few hours of sleep last night, the first I’ve had since I caught pneumonia, so I am very grateful. On the poetry side, I’m trying to write a poem involving the words sleep deprivation, supersoldier, and infiltrants. (They did a chest CTscan looking for “infiltrants.” I was delighted to learn a new interesting medical term…though I guess I hope I don’t have any of them, since they are cells or body fluids that have passed into a tissue or body cavity.)
Back from a very hot and dry Seattle (92 high!) where I was very happy to get to see some of my poetry friends (Hi Joannie, Kelli, Annette, and Lana!) My friends are definitely the thing I miss most about Seattle.
My upper respiratory thing of course came back with a vengeance the morning I had to fly home. The last time I flew with this kind of sinus infection I burst an ear drum, so this time I loaded up on Sudafed, ear planes, nasal spray, and brought hot tea on the plane. It still hurt so bad I wanted to cry like the chorus of three babies that were wailing around us the whole flight. Boo on bad health, I say! Isn’t it time for me to get better? I now have the choice of moving to some very strong (read: bad side effect) antibiotics or some very strong (with side effects) steroids. Of course, you can’t take these particular antiobiotics with the steroids because they interact (there’s interesting interference between floroquinolones and steroids and NSAIDS, by the way, if you ever want to look it up…)Too bad that homeopathic stuff never really works with me. If I could buy stock in green tea and elderberry syrup…
Anyway, had a pleasant surprise waiting for me in the form of a contributor copy of “What We Eat When We Eat Alone: Stories and 100 Recipes)” by Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin. It’s a gorgeous, witty book full of delicious recipes, but it also has, incongruously perhaps, my poem “Spy Girls” in it, complete with a lovely illustration of a futuristic spy girl eating ice cream all alone. Really, I love illustrations – I wish publishers would illustrate all my poems 🙂
In other news, I’m eating soup and frozen sorbet, trying to work through my mental fog (over a 100 degree fever, etc.) to try to finish grading final papers. Isn’t it reassuring to students when you say stuff like – yah, I’m grading your papers through a haze of illness! LOL.
And I’m getting to know my new group of students in the Advanced class as well.
In geekier news, I was sad that ComicCon was already sold out, but bought tickets to go see Hayao Miyazaki, one of my top poetry muses, at Berkeley when he comes to give a live lecture, and booked a screening of his new movie, Ponyo by the Sea. If you haven’t seen Miyazaki’s masterpieces – my favorites are My Neighbor Totoro and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind – you really are doing yourself a disservice. The best animated movies that have been made in the last thirty years, by far.
Well, I’m off to my chicken soup and popsicle. You guys be good! The sun is out in San Diego, and cross your fingers that this darn episode of evil upper-respiratory stuff will leave me soon for good!
Two hour delay yesterday on the Alaska flight to Seattle, a shaky flight, then we checked into our hotel only to find that the restaurant was closed for “maintenance” and then when we turned on the shower there was no water. Apparently a water main for the whole building broke last night and they promised to have in on by 6 AM the next morning…which of course is just what you want when all you want is to shower and brush your teeth. (Hope they comp us for that.) Still fighting off an upper respiratory infection, so it’s extra liquids and antibiotics for me.
However, this morning the sun is shining and we saw a family of tiny ducklings and a heron flying over the water. It is much warmer here than it has been in SoCal, and Mount Rainier looks beautiful. I’m hoping to score some local cherries at the market. Seattle is so beautiful in the light. It’s still spring here, the rhododendrons and water iris (even some yellow roses) are blooming. Spring here is much more of an event than in San Diego. No spring rivals Knoxville’s or even Richmond’s, but Seattle’s is soft and the birds are singing outside my window (eating spiders off the balcony, I noted.)
Meanwhile, today I am working on grading my class’ final paper and their last workshop and starting a new class this week while I’m on the road for Glenn’s work. I’m also hoping to print out and send out my newest book MS a couple of times (I packed envelopes and SASPs…there’s dedication, right?)
Sorry I haven’t been blogging more – not really any exciting news, been evil sick for two weeks, and you know how fun that is to blog about 🙂 I’ve missed a couple of readings I wanted to go to, too. Whatever evil upper respiratory thing is going around, it takes you down and out for more than a couple of weeks, and antibiotics haven’t even made a dent. I was really thankful my teaching gig has been online, especially with the broken foot earlier and now with the virus-from-hell. I can still grade through the haze of cold medicine and tylenol.
I’m getting ready to start my new class, so I’m trying to make preparations for that as the students in my current class turn in their final poems and papers. Cross your fingers – I built the new class from scratch so I hope the students like it!
Still haven’t been submitting much, but I have some ideas for submitting…and I revised my third book manuscript a little for the next round of contests coming up in June.
I’m leaving for Seattle in a couple of days for Glenn’s work trip, so hopefully I will be slightly more well by then. Slow going. I heard it’s been sunnier there than here in San Diego anyway, so maybe the change in locale will actually help! It’s misting outside right now and in the low sixties. Practically regulation NW weather…
Looking forward to seeing a few friends and checking out the bookstores (especially Open Books) as usual. If any of you Seattle-type friends want to get together for lunch next week, give me a buzz…
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
