Yeah, this isn’t a post about sex toys, either.

I thought perhaps I should actually tell you what had happened with Rob, yes? So now I will.

I had the stomach flu on Thursday/Friday of last week. Barfing, pooping, the whole deal. It was gross, but I lived through it, although I think this was the first time I’d had the actual FLU-flu in a long time. People call alot of things the flu, but this was really it.
Rob started feeling icky on Thursday afternoon, and started really throwing up on Friday night/Saturday morning. At first it was just every couple of hours, like you do. But by Saturday evening, he was throwing up everytime he swallowed anything, basically. Plus the ‘rhia, which I know you don’t want to hear about, but it was part of everything. I was trying to make sure he drank plenty of juice, water, ginger ale, anything clear that he could swallow… but by Sunday morning he was either throwing up or otherwise evacuating every 5-10 minutes. We had both slept in the livingroom (because it was too tough for him to walk up and down the stairs from our bedroom to the bathroom every 20 minutes), him on the couch, me on a little nest I had made on the floor, and at around 4:30 or 5 am I took him to the Emergency Room, where they basically looked at us like “EVERYONE has the flu. Stop overcrowding our waiting room!”, gave him a shot of Gravol, and sent us home with Immodium (which, he’d already taken half a package of Immodium, and it hadn’t helped at all). The gravol made him woozy, which was good because basically he hadn’t slept since Friday night. However nothing stopped his throwing up or pooping, and because of that he couldn’t exactly sleep. At 2 pm he looked dead. His skin was parchment-white. His eyes were sunken in– he looked as though he had two black eyes. He was freezing cold to the touch, and in pain all over. He could barely speak, and was just lying all pathetically on the sofa, holding his barf bucket. I told him we were going back to the hospital. He grunted something along the lines of them just sending us home again, what’s the use of going, so I got all butch and called his mom. Yeah, I know how to bring in the big guns. After he listened to her for a few minutes he agreed that we could go in to the hospital.

That was when we both got really scared. He couldn’t stand up. He couldn’t dress himself. He could barely lift his arms so that I could help him change his shirt. Those of you who’ve met him know this, but Rob is a big guy. And strong. He couldn’t bend over to put his shoes on. I had to prop him up all the way to the car. When we got to the ER, he couldn’t walk in; I got a wheelchair for him and he barely got from the car to the chair.

The nurses were having lots of trouble with just taking his vitals. His blood pressure was so low that they couldn’t measure it. It took them about a jillion pokes and prods just to be able to find a vein for taking blood. When the (different from that morning) doctor came in, he knew just by looking at Rob that he was dehydrated, but when the results of the bloodwork came back he told us that Rob was the most dehydrated that he’d ever seen a person still conscious. That was when Rob started having really bad pains in his back– bad enough that he was writhing around in pain. They didn’t really say anything in the room, just gave him some Tylenol and continued putting in his IVs (he had two IV’s in– one to return fluids to his body, another with a blood product that would help to expand those fluids, because they couldn’t give him too much saline at once because saline is salt water and Rob’s salt levels were high because of the dehydration etc etc), but I heard the doctor in the hallway mentioning that they should test for “PARF”.

Rob was finally admitted to the ICU after a few hours. It was a very long couple of days– they measured his output of fluids, and in a 6-hour period he lost 12L. They had the IV’s wide open, but it was hard to keep up with his fluid loss. His heart was fluttery, his blood pressure was still really low. I slept in his room with him, on the chair, until the nurse came in at about 5 am and told me to go sleep on the sofa in the room down the hall.

He eventually got much better, and was let out of ICU on Tuesday, and moved to a room in the “regular” wing. He was still on his IV’s, and having his blood tested four times a day. They were also still giving him Gravol and Imodium every hour. But his blood pressure had come back up, his heart rate was strong, and he was actually eating (popsicles and jello, but still, it’s eating!)

When he was released, on Wednesday, the doctor told us everything that had been going on. The “PARF” thing stands for “Prerenal Acute Renal Failure”. Basically, since his blood pressure was so low, his blood wasn’t circulating everywhere. His kidneys started shutting down, which is what caused the pain. Luckily it’s very treatable and once he was fully rehydrated he was better from that, but it did take three days to get him fully rehydrated. He stayed home the rest of the week; I went back in to work on Friday but was phoning him at every break to make sure things were okay. He’s still exhausted– we went to buy groceries on Friday evening and he was tired out after five minutes of walking around the store– and probably will be for awhile. In fact, for the first time in… well, forever, since I’ve known him, he actually went to bed before me tonight.

I’m writing this and it’s not even seeming real to me yet. I write with no emotion, because if I allowed myself to, I would be crying like a baby right now. I almost lost my husband. He was close to dying. I see those words on the screen, but I’m not processing them. The important thing is that he’s okay now. I’m sure that I would be a living organism if he weren’t around, but I’d like to avoid that possibility for a very long time, thank you.

Yesterday I spent the day in the ER again, this time with my mother. She was having chest pain, arm pain, back pain, etc. etc. etc. so my father brought her in. After a multitude of tests and eight hours in the Critical Care unit, they said it wasn’t her heart, they THINK it was her esophagus spasming but they’re not sure, and they sent her home.

I plan on not visiting the hospital again for at least a couple of months, okay? OKAY?!