Since I’ve been spending most of 2018 in terrible shape health-wise, I have a pile of blog topics waiting to be written. However, several people have been asking for follow-up on my recent hospitalization. Just yesterday, a friend sent this text: “Can you please update me on your health? I’m worried about you.”
I realize that posting that I was in the hospital with limited details and very little follow-up is kind of unfair, but since I was released from my 6-day stay, I’ve had a lot to digest and consider about my health. For many of you, this post will include way too much detail, so feel free to skip this one and wait until I’m back to writing about more interesting topics such as what not to wear in airports. For those of you who do want to know what’s going on, as I always say with friends, “I’ll do my best to tell the Cliffs Notes version of this.” And friends laugh every time, because two hours later, the story’s almost over. I’ve told this story face-to-face several times, and every time, it takes two hours. There’s a lot to cover.
Let’s start with 2017. (I told you there’s a lot to cover!) In April of 2017, I saw my lady doc for an annual, and she sent me off to get the usual testing and blood work. That day, I asked her about getting my tubes tied because ain’t nobody in my house got time for an unexpected arrival.
“Oh God, no!” said the lady doc. “Send your husband for a vasectomy! It’s way easier.”
I went home, talked to Tim about a vasectomy, and he promptly scheduled an appointment with a urologist. The next thing you know, we’re sitting in the urologist’s office at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, learning Tim had not one, but two flavors of cancer – prostate cancer and leukemia.
At that point, everything went into both fast forward and slow motion all at the same time. Focused fully on Tim and his treatment, I completely ignored my own follow-up appointments. He had surgery in July, followed by radiation in the fall. After radiation, Tim started hormone therapy, and through support of family and friends, we managed to make it through in one piece. Tim’s CLL (leukemia) is currently Stage Zero, which is really great news.
In January, Tim and I got both strains of the flu, so January was basically a wash because we were both so sick. I chalked it up weakened a immune system due to the stress of a really difficult year, the stress of the holidays, and the stress of my job.
In March, we went to New Orleans for a much-needed vacation. While there — I won’t go into the gory details — I somehow contracted a staff infection on my neck and back. It was super gross and scary, and if you ever get one, call me and we can talk about the weirdness that is a bleach bath, because that’s one of the many things I had to do to get over that. Against my wishes, I started a round of hard core antibiotics to knock out the staff infection. I have a lifelong hatred for antibiotics. I took them when I was 16 because I had 3 pimples and the old school East Texas dermatologist put me on them for an extended period, and they’ve caused issues for me ever since. Generally speaking, I try hard not to take any medicine at all. And, up until 2018, I hardly ever got sick.
A few days into the round of antibiotics, I got a sore throat. Because I’m paranoid and a bit of a hypochondriac, I googled “Staff infection and sore throat.” Terrible idea. The first thing I came across was some random message board where a woman wrote, “My husband got staff infection and a sore throat and died four days later.”
Properly terrified, I called my new primary care physician to tell her about my latest ailment. I refer to her as my “hippy dippy” doctor, and the story of how I got to her is an important part of this seemingly endless tale. When Tim was diagnosed with cancer, a dear family friend recommended a book by Rip Esselstyn, the firefighter who introduced a plant-based eating lifestyle to firefighters in Austin. Rip is the founder of Engine 2, a plant-based eating program that is changing lives like nobody’s business.
In January, Tim attended one of Rip’s lectures at Whole Foods, and during the Q&A, Tim asked if there were any doctors in Austin who advocate plant-based eating, because his cardiologist had suggested South Beach, which left us shaking our heads and wondering if that advice was dealt out to keep the cardiologist in business. Rip knew of a doctor in Denver, but didn’t have much to offer for Austin specifically.
After the Q&A, a woman approached Tim and gave him the name of Dr. Bharati Kolte of Flora Medical Clinic in Austin. Given the tremendous amount of research behind prevention and treatment of cancers tied to a plant-based diet, Tim called and made appointments for both of us for March (her first availability due to her popularity).
In early March, we had our first appointments with Dr. Kolte. She ordered the standard blood work for both of us, and spent 30 minutes with each of us, explaining her overall philosophy to healthcare — that most disease is preventable by diet, and some disease is reversible with diet. Her practice is intentionally small – she employees a medical assistant, a practice manager and lifestyle counselor, and a plant-based chef. She has a full kitchen in her office where they teach cooking classes and nutritional counseling. She’s a small woman, but she is mighty, and Tim and I were extremely impressed with her from the start. As an introduction into the plant-based world, Dr. Kolte’s message was simple: “Fill half of your plate with vegetables. Fill the other half with 25% whole grains, and 25% legumes.”
That seemed simple enough. Now, at this point in the documentary about my health, you’re probably asking, “But wait, what about the cheese? And how do you get enough protein?” Lucky for us, in 2017 we’d already been dipping our toe into eating meat much less often and trying to cut back on dairy, so we already knew that you can get ample protein from veggies, so her advice wasn’t terribly extreme based on how we’d been eating over the past year.
At my first doctor’s visit with Dr. Kolte, my blood pressure was pretty high, and she suggested I might have white coat syndrome, but asked me to purchase a BP monitor. I’d been told this more than once over the years, and because I’m stubborn and lazy and forgetful, I never followed up. Huge mistake, as new research indicates that white coat hypertension may actually be a sign of actual hypertension – if you’re stressed at the doctor, you’re probably stressed in traffic, when your mother in-law comes to town, or when you’re within a 2 mile radius of a pre-teen. It could be a sign of bigger problems.
If you’ve been told to check your BP regularly, Quardio makes a blood pressure monitor that’s so cool I’m going to write them a letter with hopes of being one of their spokespeople. It hooks up to your phone so you push “start” and it records the information directly onto the app, and if you want, you can share that data directly with your doctor before Facebook shares it with your entire list of friends. Now, at my 423 follow up appointments, I get to whip out my phone and bore the physicians and nurses to tears with my entire BP history since March. More on that in a bit.
Back to this crazy story. When I got a sore throat just mere days after having a staff infection, I started to worry. Why was I so sick? Did having the flu in January twice just kick my immune system to the curb? Was the sore throat the staff infection seeping into my blood stream? Why was I so fatigued, and sneaking in 20 minute naps whenever I could? Why would long naps on the weekend not result in my feeling rested at all? Why was I waking up from every nap and craving sugar?
I went to Dr. Kolte’s office when the sore throat worsened, and she did an in-office strep test as well as the one you send off to the lab. The in-office test came back negative. I didn’t have fever, so Dr. Kolte said I likely had tonsillitis. In addition, my fancy new blood pressure gizmo proved easily that I had hypertension. My BP was quite high, so Dr. Kolte sent me home with a prescription for blood pressure medication and orders to get in bed and rest. I made a decision to wait to take the BP medicine until after I was off of antibiotics, because both the BP medicine and the hard core antibiotics might make me dizzy, and I didn’t want to be dizzy without knowing why. (Did I mention I hate taking medicine?) So, I crawled back in bed and stayed there for days and days, never feeling better.
I’m getting in the weeds of some details here, but these details matter for the bigger picture, so bear with me. During my bed rest, I never fully stopped working because I’m a workaholic and at my job, if you take time off, the emails just pile up so I had to do my best to stay on top of things. I worked from bed where I would rest where I could, and since I had very little appetite, I drank Gatorade or Powerade pretty much exclusively for days on end. I started dropping weight, something I never cry about. Deep down, I knew something bigger was going on.
By the weekend, I still felt rotten but I wanted to get out of the house, so we ventured out that Saturday to the Democratic convention and the March for Our Lives because my personality type tells me when I feel a tiny bit better, it’s prime time to go to a big convention, sign up to be a delegate, and march a few miles in the sun.
That afternoon, Dr. Kolte called to let me know the lab test revealed that I actually did have strep throat. This news made me so frustrated and defeated, because it meant I had to stop the antibiotic for the staff infection (which was already much better, thank goodness), and move over to another antibiotic for the strep throat.
A week passed, and by that Friday night I was in excruciating pain in the back of my neck that kept me up most of the night. The only thing that would give me any relief was to stand in the shower with hot water running on my neck as I cried and said, “Something is not right. Something is not right.”
The next day, I called Dr. Kolte and since it was the weekend, she advised that I wait until Monday and go in to see her again if I wasn’t better. By Monday, I wasn’t better, and when I got to Dr. Kolte’s office, the back of my neck was so stiff that I could hardly move it. I got back to Googling and diagnosed myself with meningitis, but I didn’t really present with those symptoms since I didn’t have a fever. After examining me, Dr. Kolte determined that I might have an infected salivary gland as a complication from the strep. She called up her friend, an ENT, and sent me directly to his office.
At the ENT’s office, they didn’t check my blood pressure, probably because I’d been squeezed in and they were in a hurry. The doctor felt around on my neck, and made this assessment.
“I have never seen anyone with such a tense neck! You need a massage!” the ENT said. “But this doesn’t appear to be a salivary gland infection. You don’t have fever, and I can’t see anything in your throat because it’s so swollen. This appears to be musculoskeletal. Go home, take three Ibuprofen, and drink a bottle of Chardonnay. Take a hot shower. You have to relax those muscles.”
He didn’t REALLY mean for me to drink a bottle of Chardonnay, but he did give me the green light to have a glass of wine. When we got home, I popped a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, and never touched it. I felt too rotten. I got in bed with a heating pad, and by 3:30 the next morning, I woke up Tim and begged him to take me to the hospital.
We called the ENT, and he ordered me to go to St. David’s, and tell the ER that I needed imaging and blood work. Somehow, I logged into my work computer and cancelled all of my meetings and sent my boss a note because I’m that kind of employee and THAT wired not to just take care of the emergency first.
From there, everything definitely zipped into fast forward because I was really out of it. I signed into the ER and they admitted me very quickly. They stuck me with an IV and gave me morphine, which immediately made me nauseous and drunk out of my head.
At that point, it felt like everything anyone had to say was bad news. My blood pressure was something insane like 220/120, and my pulse was hovering around 120. Soon, the emergency room doctor came in with the result of the blood work.
“Your blood sugar is sky high. Have you been diagnosed with diabetes? Because you are diabetic.”
Even thought I was doped up on morphine, the news wasn’t surprising. For starters, I had gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with Emily Rose, and was told that there would be a much greater chance I would have it as an adult if I didn’t get my weight under control. Yet somehow, by the time ER turned 12, I still had on lots of extra “baby weight.” Several years ago, I went in for my annual visit and the doctor called me to let me know my blood sugar was in the borderline range. He asked me to come in and follow up, and I dug my heels in and told myself, “I’ll drop 25 pounds and go see him when I’m thinner. Problem solved.”
It won’t be much of a surpise for me to tell you I didn’t follow up with the doctor. However, I lost 30 pounds over a period of a few years. Slowly, I was determined to conquer the label of diabetes. I figured if I lost weight and went back to the doctor, they would pat me on the back for a job well done and the topic would go away.
The emergency room doc turned me over to the internal medicine doctor, and within minutes, they told me I would be admitted for seven days. SEVEN days! They rolled me in for a CAT scan, and while it wasn’t an MRI, they call it a CAT scan for a reason, because they are shoving your human head in a machine that was clearly designed for a cat. I’m claustrophobic, so even on morphine I was mere seconds away from a full-fledged panic attack. The only thing that kept me still and quiet was noticing that they really needed to take a Clorox wipe to the inside of that machine because it was really schmutzy.
From there, I was moved to my room where we waited for the ENT to arrive, not knowing if I might just drop dead any minute. The weirdest things went through my head during that period. The first thoughts made sense – how would Emily Rose make it without a mom? I know Tim and my stepchildren and my family and friends would be okay, but she’s 15! Could she make it without me? From there, perhaps due to the morphine, I was in a complete panic about the book I wrote 2 years ago that has been sitting stagnant in my Google docs. Nobody would ever read my book because nobody would know how to hack into my Gmail and find it. Isn’t that the weirdest thing to think about if you think you might die?
The ENT came in later that morning and shared the bad news. No wonder I was in such pain – I had an abscess BEHIND my throat that was undetectable with his fancy ENT flashlight. Super gross and weird, and in combination with my other health problems, very, very scary.
I had a lot of questions.
Was this the staff infection inside my body? No.
Did I need my tonsils out? No.
Did I need to get a kidney? Because I have about 800 Facebook friends, so I can get a kidney really quickly if need be. Nope, you don’t need a new kidney.
What do we do about this? Well, because my blood pressure was sky high, surgery wasn’t an option because it was too dangerous (read: You’re within striking distance of a stroke). So, they put me on hard core IV antibiotics, and said we would hope the antibiotics kicked in soon. Oh yeah, and also, if the abscess bursts, that can make you septic (read: there’s another thing that may kill you here). We’re going to give you these antibiotics, and now, we wait.
I did my best not to fall into a complete panic. Had my angel of a sister and my amazing husband not been there for the first few days, I might have stroked out completely. I was certainly close. In the meantime, I tried to navigate how to tell my work that I was definitely not going to be able to work at least for a week, knowing deep down I was in no shape whatsoever to help my customers when the person I needed to help most of all was myself.
The antibiotics, the ENT, and the nursing staff at St David’s saved my life. Still, during the first few days, my BP was extremely high, as was my resting pulse. I was just lying in a hospital bed doing nothing, but my resting pulse rate hovered around 110. This was concerning both to the ENT and the internal medicine doctor. Before I knew it, I was on 7-8 medications. They’d try one, and change it. Try another, and move it to a different format. At a turtle’s pace they got my blood pressure to a less than terrifying rate, and the same for my blood sugar. The antibiotics worked, and surgery was never necessary. I stayed in the hospital for six full days to allow the doctors to figure out the mystery of why my numbers were so scarily elevated. There were several specialists involved as they tried to figure out the mystery of my high numbers. The ENT focused on the throat issue, while the hospital internal medicine doctor focused on my blood pressure and blood sugar.
The internal medicine doctor came in about midway through the week, sat down with his head in his hands and said, “Amy, you have stumped me. With most of my patients, I know what is wrong. With you, we’re looking for zebras.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, except later it dawned on me that zebras are unusual, so he was looking for the unusual thing going on with me. Pair this statement with the overnight tech who told me I was “like an episode of ‘House,’ and I was more than a little unsettled at all of the unknown. They checked my kidneys, and sent a nephrologist to see me. The sonogram of my kidneys indicated nothing dire was happening there. One night, I had a crazy rapid heart rate for 8 seconds, so they put me on an EKG and ordered a heart sonogram. Nothing dire appeared to be happening there, either, so they directed that I follow up with the specialists after my release.
When I was discharged on Saturday, I felt like an entirely different person but I was understandably wiped out. The grim realization that I would return home with a pile of pills to lower my BP and blood sugar was extremely depressing, and when we got home, I flopped down on the couch and sobbed for a good long while. Tim went to the pharmacy to pick up my piles of medications, and a darkness settled over me at the thought of being on so many drugs.
Then, I quit sobbing and got to business.
My neighbor came over to show me how to check my blood sugar, as it’s been 15 years since I had gestational diabetes. I was prescribed insulin – something I never needed while pregnant as diet and exercise kept my numbers in control – but my fear of needles (even very small ones) led me to nominate Tim to be the person to shoot me with insulin at night.
In addition to being fully focused on getting well, I’m also focused on being extremely grateful to be alive. One of my friends texted me that she was so sorry I was sick, and that “Getting old sucks!” And I fired right back, “No, it doesn’t! It beats the alternative and I’m so excited to be in my best health ever.”
So that’s where I am. I’m on short-term medical leave with orders from all of the doctors to rest, eat well, and get my health house in order. It feels very counterintuitive for me to spend the day relaxing, going to yoga, and taking care of myself instead of focusing on taking care of my customers and taking on too many projects, but that’s what I have to do. Thanks to Dr. Kolte, I have nutritional counseling, cooking classes, and lifestyle counseling at my fingertips. I’m cleared by the cardiologist to “train for a 10K,” though currently walking after meals and an occasional barre class is doing the trick.
Remember how I mentioned that the 2 weeks before I landed in the hospital, I was living on Gatorade and Powerade? Imagine what THAT did to my blood pressure and blood sugar! Also, this has been extremely difficult for me to admit, but several weeks prior to my strep throat diagnosis, I was consuming several real Cokes every day. I was hiding it like a sad alcoholic, too. We were burning through canned sodas – something we normally don’t keep in the house – but I kept asking Tim to go buy them. I’d gotten to a place where I was “treating myself” with sugar because I was craving it so desperately. My undiagnosed and uncontrolled diabetes could easily have killed me.
I hesitated to share with you that I am a diabetic because I absolutely hate the label. For me, I have allowed that to come with a nice dose of guilt and shame. I’ve been told by every doctor that I have to stop doing that because my diagnosis is reversible and also partially genetic (though my parents don’t have diabetes it is in my family). I’m learning to be easier on myself – feeling guilt and shame is pointless. At the beginning of the year, I created a mantra for myself (and hopefully others!) to #EaseUp, but once I was diagnosed with diabetes, I was harder on myself than ever. I am getting comfortable knowing that doing the work to get healthy is where I need to focus my efforts, not on self-blame. Who has time for guilt and shame when you’re trying to live your best life?
So, this is where I am today. I’ve already lost weight, except this time it’s not due to illness but due to eating food that is now medicine. I’m drinking a ton of water. I have zero desire to touch a can of Coke. I’m popping out of bed at 6:30 every day, feeling rested for the first time in as long as I can remember. I’m walking after almost every meal, just like I did when I had gestational diabetes, because that is how I kept myself off of insulin during that time. Though I’m still not fond of medication, I’m allowing modern medicine to work it’s magic, because right now, it’s what I need to get better. Thanks to a doctor who wants her patients off of as many medications as possible, we meet weekly and discuss our plan to reverse my diabetes through diet and exercise, as well as the high blood pressure.
When I was in the hospital, my mother and stepfather were moving into a different house and couldn’t come down to see me. Mom called and told me that while she was praying for me, she was flooded with a strong feeling that I was about to be in a place where I was healthier than ever. I wasn’t so certain when I was worried about dying, but now that I’m on the other side, I agree with her completely.
So, if you’ve stuck with this endless saga, I have advice for you. Please, please go see your doctor. Get the mammogram. Guys, get your prostate exams. Request that your doctor sends you for complete bloodwork. Listen to your body. I was stubborn and in denial and it could have killed me. Go forth and take care of yourselves, and I’ll do my best to do the same.
To the friends and family who brought food, prayed, sent flowers, and called, texted, and sent sweet messages, I truly couldn’t have made it through this without your love and support. The outpouring of love was and is overwhelming to me, and when I think of how much love came my way, I’m flooded with tears of joy. I had a friend pay for Buddhist monks to pray for me while I was in the hospital, and offer to do Reiki to help with my healing. Friends sent recommendations for meditation videos and apps for lowering blood pressure. My husband slept night after night in that God-awful hospital chair/bed contraption, never once complaining. My sister did the same. She also helped me shower, and even shaved my legs for me while I was in the hospital bed – that is absolute true love. Family friends brought homemade vegetarian meals, offered to hang out with ER, and sat with me in the hospital as I cried in fear. My BFFs Candace and Lori did so much for me I will never be able to thank them properly. Thank you all for your support and encouragement during this journey! I only hope that my choice to tell the details of this crazy ordeal will help inspire others to put their health first. Love to all. #EaseUp
