Commedy of Errrors III

(This all took place two weeks ago - Nov 30th, I'm just catching up now.)

That evening I had a fever of about 100.5. Now it's common to get a mild fever when when udnergoing radiation treatment, and my reckoning was that the Haematoma from the fall had puhed it a bit higher. However, the bone marrow transplant handbook tells one to cotact the resident Haem-onc fellow when the fever gets too high, so after some 'discussion' with Rona (wives always look after our interests better than we do!), that is what I did - even though I knew with sinking heart what the upshot would be - that's the problem with having some medical knowledge - go to the nearest emergency room. The nearest one happened to be our community hospital Hillcrest, in retrospect I should have made the some what longer drive to the Clinic but then hindsight is always 20/20.

Matt drove me there and we arrived about 8.30 pm. At 12.30 am I got put in a room; at 1'3o am I saw the doctor. By this time my fever had disappeared, but the doc insisted on doing blood tests anyway. A little later a tech came to draw blood, which she did after a rather perfunctory skin prep. I ventured mildly that If she was doing a blood culture a more elaborate prep may be in order - it's amazing really how afraid most doc's are to push their weight around- but she assured me that she had preped with the very latest commercial gadget. My white count was negative, so they sent me home, arriving back at about 4.00 am.

On my way to the clinic on Wednesday (The 2nd) for radiation treatment they called me to say that my blood culture was growing something and they would admit me...

(to be continued)

Frank