strike that

lessons

The moral of today’s story is: be careful what you wish for.

For example, the universe might hear your request for high adventure and send you on a seemingly fun and innocent date that ends in South Austin Hospital’s Emergency Room. Because you’ve never been in an ambulance before, thinks the universe. That would count as Adventure.

This is going to be long, and graphic, and gross, and maybe you just want to skip this post. But I feel sort of vaguely in shock at the moment, and I think writing about it will help me. But I’ll make an exception to the I-Hate-Spoilers rule and tell you it all turned out alright. So.

Lauren and Marc, due to a weird twist of events this weekend, are in Portland. It’s just me and Ella the Giant Yellow Lab around here. So last night I made plans with J, whom I met for coffee last weekend and went swing dancing with on Wednesday. He picked me up at 7. Our plan was to have a picnic in the riverside park next to the Congress Avenue Bridge. This bridge is home to over a million bats – the largest urban bat colony in the world – and each night around dusk they all fly out to find food. It’s one of those Austin must-sees.

We parked in the city center and walked a mile or so to the park. There were scattered drops of rain and a breeze, but the sun felt strangely hot. J had packed us a whole picnic dinner: sandwiches, carrot sticks, plumbs, pears, cole slaw, bottles of water. All in a little cooler with ice. We got to the park early, found a nice flat spot, spread out his big blanket, and ate.

We talked about Kansas and religious fundamentalism and fruits we don’t like. And oddly, we talked about how many poisonous things there are in Texas.

And then the bats started flying out, big black clouds of them. Bats are beautiful. These bats are Mexican free-tail bats, which are small and fly quickly and erratically. They streamed over our heads and disappeared off into the trees. It was really cool.

I had taken off my shoes to sit on the picnic blanket, and when the bats started flying we walked across the lawn to a more crowded spot that was better for viewing. While I was looking up at the bats I felt a little sting on my foot. I thought it was a mosquito. And then I felt another. I looked down and there were a couple ants on my feet. Small but ordinary looking black ants. I brushed them off. I went back to the bats.

There were more stings. One of them was quite painful. I laughed and brushed it off. J asked what was going on and I said I’d probably stood on an ant hole. I felt silly even complaining about a little ant bite when there were these thousands and thousands of bats overhead that clearly deserved full attention.

And then the bats finished flying, more or less, and we went back to the picnic blanket to talk about it. There were six or seven bites on my feet. My little toe felt hot and itchy. And then I started to feel hot all over. I was trying to talk about the bats but suddenly I felt flushed and feverish and sick. I took some ice from the cooler and held it on my neck. I felt terribly dizzy. I also felt weird and embarrassed. And then suddenly I was lying on my stomach on the blanket, concentrating very hard on my breathing. I couldn’t think at all.

I told J I might need some Benadryl, that maybe I was having an allergic reaction. I told him this while lying there with my head buried and spinning. He went to find a first aid kit. And then I puked. Twice. Which was hard, because I could barely lift my head. I felt sweaty and fragile and totally unable to move.

All of this happened within maybe five minutes.

And then it got hard to breathe. I’m allergic to cats, and about three times ever I’ve had such a bad reaction that I couldn’t breathe. It’s really scary. Pain sucks but you just sort of wait it out. But not being able to breathe induces panic. Because, you know, you can’t breathe. You can’t wait it out.

J came back and there was no first aid kit. The breathing was getting harder. When this happened before with cats, I was always able to go outside into the fresh air and clear it right up. But this air was stifling and heavy. I asked J to call an ambulance.

And this is the part where I thought maybe I was going to die. Which now sounds ridiculous and melodramatic. But I couldn’t move, could barely talk or turn my head, and my lungs felt swelled up and constricted, and my brain wasn’t working at all except for this weird detached little narrative that was like, Shit. I think I’m going to die in this park in Texas, all because of this random decision to come watch bats tonight. One of those crazy totally avoidable deaths that just happens during a regular day.

Then someone held a cell phone to my ear, and this woman, who I guess was the 911 woman, started asking me questions. I don’t remember what she asked. I remember that I had to keep repeating myself, because she couldn’t understand my answers. She told me not to eat or drink anything, which somewhere in all the blur I found funny. And she kept telling me the ambulance would be there really soon. Except it kept not being there. I think she asked me what I was wearing, so they could find me. She kept talking and talking, and I tried to focus on her voice.

And then there was this guy’s voice above me, and he was asking me things, but I don’t remember that part clearly either. And then I got these terrible, terrible cramps, and I had to go to the bathroom. Except I was in the middle of the park, and couldn’t move. And I said to the EMT, whose name was Matt, I really have to go to the bathroom. And he said, Well, I don’t have a bathroom here. Which let me tell you, was a really unhelpful thing to say. Because I was lying immobilized two inches from my own vomit hardly able to breathe and what I didn’t want to have to do, just then, was problem solve. My mind actually cleared enough at that moment for me to really dislike this guy.

But the cramps were so awful that I somehow got up and stumbled over to a few trees and just went to the bathroom. Luckily I was wearing a skirt and I had this big blanket wrapped around me. It was horrible, but I guess it could have been marginally worse. And then I passed out.

Woohoo, Adventure!

Matt’s voice came back. I still hadn’t seen him because my eyes were closed, but I heard him asking me to walk over to a stretcher. Which was a total physical impossibility. He asked again and now I really hated him. Finally he and the other EMT, Chris, carried me onto it. And then they wheeled me into the ambulance and shut the door.

And then suddenly, I felt like my brain was attached to my body again.

It was cool and bright in the ambulance. It also felt clean and safe. The air conditioning was blowing right on me, and I could breathe again. As fast as it had come, it disappeared.

Matt started asking me lots of questions about what happened, and now I could answer them clearly. I told him about the ants. He looked at my feet and said that if it was an allergic reaction, my feet would be swollen. He was convinced I had heat stroke. I had taken Ella on a long walk just before J picked me up, and then we walked a long way to the park, but I didn’t feel like that was it. But he was convinced. I guess they get a lot of that.

He recommended that I go to the hospital, but he couldn’t take me unless I consented. I wasn’t sure. Suddenly I felt so much better, like that feeling when a fever breaks. It felt stupid and unnecessary and expensive to go to the hospital. But I was also terribly thirsty, and still having awful cramps, and shaking. He kept saying, “If you let us take you, we can start an i.v., and that will make you feel better.” And after about five minutes I realized that I still couldn’t even sit up if I wanted to. And I really, really wanted that i.v. to make the thirst and the cramps go away. So I agreed.

They gave me an i.v., which I’ve never had before. Matt said that he had been on worse dates, one where a girl had a seizure and another where a girl peed in his closet. I took a shit in a public park, I said. Yes, he said, but you’re from Oregon. Don’t y’all shit in the woods all the time? It was the only redeeming thing he said all night.

Chris got in the front and we left. It was kind of fun to ride in an ambulance. I felt shitty but so much less shitty than before, and the whole series of events seemed so unreal and insane, and I was kind of laughing. In the ambulance. Matt filled out paperwork the whole time.

We got to the hospital and they wheeled me out. People out front were staring at me. They wheeled me into the emergency entrance and into a little curtained exam room. They lifted me onto a bed. This whole time they were talking to each other about where to go get dinner. They were talking about which nearby Mexican restaurant had good grilled chicken. I really, really hated them.

And then I was just in this bright room alone. A nurse tech named Marciella came in and hooked me up to a heart monitor that beeped and showed my heartbeat like on TV. And she left.

Eventually a nice nurse named Brooke came in, and she said, “I’ll be taking care of you tonight.” It was what I wished someone had said in the ambulance.

And then J arrived, and sat next to me on a folding chair. This poor guy. So not what he signed up for. And I wanted to be able to tell him that I was fine and he should go, but I wouldn’t even have been able to sit up at this point, much less figure out how to get home.

In a while this doctor came in named Andrew Jones. He was young and really good looking in this very comforting way, soft blue eyes and gray hair. He was extremely kind. He asked me what happened and I told him, and he said I had probably had a severe allergic reaction to all those ant bites. He asked the nurse to give me Benadryl and some other drug that sounded like, but was not, Xanax. And these things put me to sleep.

And some time after midnight, after two bags of saline and antihistamines had been emptied into my left arm, I signed a lot of papers and walked very slowly to the car. And J stopped at the 24-hour HEB supermarket and got me Benadryl, which I have to take today to avoid having a relapse reaction.

And this morning I feel tired and weak and achy but fine, which makes the whole thing seem even more surreal. And I avoid that word at all costs. But it’s just crazy, that last night I was lying face down in the grass in Texas thinking maybe I was going to just be dead, and fourteen hours later I’m blogging about it. It feels so weird that when La called this morning from Portland to see if I was going to the farmer’s market, I didn’t mention it. I kind of feel like maybe I blew the whole thing out of proportion, or just made it up entirely.

So that’s my latest adventure.

posted by tortaluga @ 9:51 AM