My birthday week was going great – I got to celebrate Monday and Tuesday night with all of my friends and was gearing up for my birthday dinner and “Jackie the Pub Crawl” on Thursday. That’s when it struck. Wednesday morning I woke up with a headache but I figured it was just because I was tired and had been out late. However, throughout the day it started getting worse and worse to the point that it was almost unbearable. After dinner, I took what I thought would be a short nap and woke up 3 hours later. I was feeling better so at midnight, my friends and I went to the local pub to celebrate the beginning of my real birthday. After 20 minutes, I started feeling terrible again and couldn’t even enjoy myself. An hour after getting there, we left and went to get Ayden’s (best late night Turkish food EVER… BK is no match for a late night kebab). I felt so sick I couldn’t even eat (that’s when you know I’m sick). So I tried sleeping but around 4am I woke up shaking, with the worst headache I have ever had, and feeling nauseous. I called my mom to see what I should do and she told me to go to the hospital.
When I got to the ER, they gave me some painkillers and told me to wait. Because I had gone out, they figured it was probably just a hangover. So I sat in the waiting room, curled up in a ball for a few hours. Around me was an interesting group of people – a girl with an IV who kept apologizing for last night (I assume she was too drunk), a man with a hand smashed in by a door, and an old man that wasn’t wearing a shirt and had cuts all over his face. After a couple of hours of waiting, I finally got to see the doctor. They decided to do blood tests and an intern came to poke a needle into my veins. I guess she hadn’t had much experience because it took four pokes in different parts of my arms to get it right. One of the times, she even started wiggling the needle in my arm; I could feel it pushing into my muscle. Eventually, she got it right. I was given an IV and a bed to rest in.
A few hours later, the doctor came back and said that, as a precaution, they were going to do a spinal tap. They didn’t expect to find anything but just wanted to make sure. I got changed into a hospital gown, they gave me morphine (that was funny) and some anesthetics, and before I knew it, I was out. I woke up an hour or two later to find my friends and Kat from Arcadia standing by my bedside. A doctor came over and I was informed that they found meningitis in my spinal fluid. Awesome. Meningitis on my birthday. This would happen to me.
I had to spend the night in the hospital, which is probably one of the worst ways to spend a birthday, but my friends were great. They brought the celebration to me by bringing me Japanese food, a cake, and the birthday packages I had received. After they had to leave because visiting hours were over, I tried sleeping but the one of the other patients in the room kept screaming on the phone about how the doctors weren’t listening to her. Apparently, there was some conspiracy against her…. The other two patients were much quieter: one was about to have a major surgery the next day and the other was a very old lady who seemed to be on her deathbed. I finally fell asleep but every hour or so the nurses woke me up to change my IV and take some more blood. When I woke up in the morning, I was feeling better and was able to go back to my apartment! I had to stay in bed for the next week and a half and take painkillers every few hours, but it was nice resting in my own bed and watching lots of movies. The meningitis affected my walking so I wasn’t able to walk or move too much for the next week. My version of walking was more a slow painful shuffle. Leaving the hospital, we flagged a taxi and asked to go to the village, which is only about 2 blocks away. Seeing where we were heading, the taxi driver started laughing and made fun of us for being lazy. You can bet he stopped laughing after I told him I was in the hospital and was unable to walk.
So I left my teenage years as a sickly hospital patient with a yet a longer medical history. But at least it makes a good story. I think the best part of being in the hospital on my birthday was when they doctors would ask when my birthday was to check the charts and medicine. The conversation went a little like this:
Doctor: Just to clarify, when is your birthday?
Me: Today.
Doctor: No, when’s your BIRTHDAY?
Me: TODAY.
Doctor: Ohhhh. Wow. I’m sorry. Well… happy birthday?
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