First Hospital, Third Week

I was arranged and put into a room where I was taken care of, most of this I don't remember, except for a few things. This is when my illness really began. There was an old African American nurse who came in and washed me up, since I had been sweating so much from the fever. I immeadiatly took a liking to her, she was one of the sweetest nurses I had there, and there were hardly any sweet nurses in that hospital. After my first night there, my grandmother arrived at the hospital, she stayed there over night with me for a few nights, as they would run tests and other things to find out what was wrong with me. By the second day in the hospital, I had pnuemonia very badly. I got up to walk to the bathroom, and then, suddenly, I felt the most excrutiating pain of my life, or so at the time it was, my lung made a kind of pop feeling, but during the pop, there was the excrutiating pain I had just mentioned. The nurse that was there with me, the third shift nurse, wasn't sure how to react, she was another sweet nurse. She called for someone to help her. After they got me situated on a bed, they moved me to a different floor of the hospital, my lung had collapsed. The only way I was able to sleep was if I was drugged on Dilaudid or Morphine. It was like this for a while, they still could not find out the main source of what was happening to me, so they called for their infectious disease doctor to help with my case. He said that I had Bacterial Pnuemonia, caused by the runny nose and such that I had before. He said it had an infection and drained into my lungs and sat there too long and caused me Pneumonia. And the reason my lungs collapsed was from that. He said there was a strange blood cell in my blood, but it wasn't possible for that to be the reason why I was sick. The fourth day... my second lung collapsed... Now I was in an even more excrutiating pain than before, not only can I barely sit up, but now, I feel pain even from being lifted to a new bed just to change sheets or anything such as that. They moved me to ICU, and I ended up having to get a cathater put in, before I was just using the restroom by a bed pan. The cathater was more comfortable in honesty, it was the least of my worries. They doctors decided they were going to give me surgery and put a tube into my lung, to drain out the fluids, so that I could breath. I forgot to mention, they had me on a breathing machine to keep my oxegyn levels more high so that I wouldn't suffocate to death. Waiting for that surgery, was the worst night of my life. The doctor wasn't going to do the surgery until the next morning, and this was truly the most traumatic part of the whole experience with Lemierre's Syndrome. I was having a very very hard time breathing, it was so shallow, that I wasn't allowed to go to sleep. It was the third shift, and the nurse for me that night was one of the bad ones, I had my share of bad nurses while I was there, but this one... was the most awful nurse yet. Her name I won't mention, I'm sure you understand. I laid in the hospital bed, gasping for air, craving each breath, in the most agonizing pain yet to come. I would ask for pain medication, and the nurse would refuse to let me have any. The doctor had just told me and my grandmother, anytime I needed pain medication, that I could have it. And this time, I needed it more than ever. As she kept saying no to my requests, my breathing became more shallow. She would tell me to do breathing exercises which I could not do because I couldn't even barely make a gasp for air. I was clinging to my life at this point, and she started to talk to me as I began to drift to sleep, she told me I didn't need my family with me, that she was all I needed. I didn't feel safe with her, she scared me and made me feel very uncomfortable. My grandma had told me when she started her shift that she had told her that she should just leave. She told my grandma that family shouldn't even be visiting me or sitting with me. I didn't understand how a nurse could say that, until she told me that I didn't need my family. With what little breath I had, I managed to say in what I thought was an angry voice, though it was weak, "I do need my family, they are what's keeping me alive. You have no right to say that to me." The nurse also was refusing to listen to my grandmother, she would ask the nurse questions, and the nurse would ignore her. And I had to tell the nurse that I wanted my grandma to talk for me because I was too weak to form sentences let alone a single word. So my grandmother requested that we call the doctor for emergency surgery, the nurse denied our request, saying that it wasn't nessecary. This is when I had the strangest dream. A dream I will remember for the rest of my life. I fell asleep, and the minute I did, I had no pain. I felt completely happy, and suddenly a hand reached down to me. I held the hand, and a brightness shined all over me. I was pulled up into the light as I held the hand, and I knew the minute I saw the hand, it was the hand of Jesus Christ. Not a single moment was I given to gather my thoughts, I knew what was going to be said before it was said. There were angels all around me. They were bright lights with wings on them, there were so many of them... and I knew them. All of them. Somehow I did, whether it was relative or friend, I knew them. It was crowded, but so comforting and roomy at the same time. Though I was completely surrounded, it was so spacious. There were colors I'd never seen before, none that anyone could imagine. Then I looked up at a light so bright, that I know if normally to look at such a light, I would be blinded. And this light... it was everywhere. I heard a voice, and it said, "Are you ready?" now when it spoke to me, it sounded beautiful, it was like wind chimes mixed with that humming noise you hear from the streat lights on a quiet night. Kind of like jingle bells with electricity. Yet, it was so beautiful. When it spoke, it didn't really speak, it thought it's words to me. And I thought words back to it, I thought back, "Can my family come too?" and the voice thought back to me once more, "Only one" and then... I looked down. I saw my grandpa, sleeping. He was fighting cancer at the time.  I stared at him for a few minutes, and then I said, "I can't" and immediatly and very suddenly, I woke up. I was in pain again. And I started to cry and cry and cry. And my grandma started to cry too. I looked at her and told her my dream. And she told me that my monitors had crashed, and that it was not a dream. I had just met God. I couldn't stop thinking about him. The thinking about him non-stop still happens to this day, 8 months later. But, however, my story doesn't end here. The next day, surgery. My grandma kept me awake all night long, to assure ourselves I would be okay. The mean nurse would come in every so often to check on me, though mostly she shot glares at my grandma and I. Morning finally came though, and I made it to 11pm, we had told the doctor everything that had happened. He apologized greatly to us, and the nurse had done things like this before, and that she was going to be fired. The surgery... they put a tube into my left lung, that would be your right though, if you were to look at me. The surgery had many many complications, they ended up giving me a drug to give me amnesia. This was because they were not able to put me to sleep, my vital signs were too low. And my breathing was too shallow. The surgery was originally supposed to be an hour, it lasted 3 or 4. I later on am told you could hear me screaming throughout the whole section of the ICU I was in, and my family was taken to a waiting room downstairs because it was such an upsetting thing to hear. My mom was breaking down from hearing it. Though they gave me amnesia, I still remember some of that surgery, and the memories are not pleasant. Some of the worst memories I will ever have in my life. After they successfully go the tube in, I started to get better little by little. The next day they put in a port, it's a tube that went in through my chest down to my heart, through my vein. It was for drawing blood and IV purposes. I didn't learn until later, that with my sitaution, that was a very dangerous move for them to make. Once my fever started to get controlled better, my family felt safe enough to let me stay alone there. My mom and sisters were there to visit me on the 7th day, and I seemed fine, but I was out of it. They assumed me to be tired and left so I could get some rest. I remember starting to feel really horrible soon after they had left, and I knew my fever was rising. I started to get scared, so I hit my nurse call button. A light turns on above my door when I hit nurse call, so that if they don't hear it at the station, they can come over if they are close by. Nobody came for about 10 minutes, so I hit it again. My nurse call light turned off. I got really scared, thinking it might be broken. So I hit it again, the light came on, soon after it turned off again. This repeated for the next 15 minutes. I started feeling so bad, that I couldn't think normally, I was about to vomit, and had nothing near me to vomit in. I had eaten for the first time in a week today, though it wasn't much at all. Just a couple of skittles. That's not what was wrong though... far from it. Finally my aunt came into my room, just as I vomited all over myself. I told her to get a nurse. She ran and got one, it happened to be a nurse who just got on shift, she rushed to my room, and took my temperature. It was 105.9, she shook her head in disbelief, attempted to take my temperature again, under my arm this time. Still 105.9, she ran to get more nurses and they started putting ice packs and cold cloths all over me to get my temperature down. The head of the nurse station came in, and my aunt called my grandmother not knowing what to do, because I was getting worse. My family decided to tranfer me to Dayton Children's. I was in no condition to make a transfer, but either way I could die. And they were going to take a risk. They argued with my current hospital for two hours trying to get them to let me transfer. Finally, they agreed to call my doctor and request it. He didn't like the idea, he wanted to keep me, he offered us a new doctor there, but they kept pushing to transfer. He finally agreed. I was transferred to Dayton Children's. I felt so relieved, even just by the ambulence paramedics who came to get me. I felt like I was going to get better finally. They were so nice and comforting to me.