Chatter. Chatter. Chatter. I heard my mom’s teeth chattering from my room. I walked into the living room to see my mom laying on the couch. Her face was as pale as a ghost. My mom was wrapped in a blanket and still shivering. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. My mom is usually the backbone of my family and she is never sick on the couch like this. I had just started kindergarten when this all unfolded. We had just gotten a new house and my mom had just gotten a new job. She was getting divorced. She was already starting to get sick and the stress from everything else wasn’t helping her immune system.
She was driving home from work with the air off, in the middle of the summer. She had just picked me up from school and she was so out of it that she forgot to put the car in park. I remember announcing, “Mom. Mom. Mom. We are rolling down the hill! ” Lethargically, my mom replied, “Oh! ” and put the car in park. She was so out of it because her temperature was so high. As soon as we got inside, she immediately put on a sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and rapped up in a blanket on the couch. I sat on the couch, watched television and took care of my mom. She laid there until my step-dad got home from work.
When my step-dad got home, she was still acting lethargic. I don’t think that my step-dad or I realized how sick my mom really was. My mom kept on insisting on going to urgent care, so we eventually let her go. My mom drove herself to urgent care because we didn’t feel the need to go with her and we thought she just had the flu or some other common sickness . When my mom got there she waited and waited and waited. She spent around a total of three hours in the waiting room of urgent care. We received a text from my mom saying she was going back to see the doctor.
About ten minutes later, we got a call from urgent care and they said that we need to drive over. They said that when they asked my mom questions, her answers didn’t make any sense. Before we even got to the urgent care, they determined that she was dehydrated and were hooking her up to an IV when we arrived. When we walked in they also told us that she wouldn’t be riding with us, she would be riding in an ambulance to the ER. We weren’t able to ride in the ambulance so we had to follow behind it. I stood from a distance, watching my mom being loaded into the ambulance. I was dazed by the whole dilemma.
Just yesterday my mom was acting normal and now I was watching her being loaded into an ambulance. A sensation of fear came over me as I started thinking the worst outcome of this situation. While following the ambulance I remember being very quiet, trying to cope this situation. I recall thinking “Is my mom going to live? ” but I was to scared to ask and find out the answer. Before I knew it, we had arrived at the hospital. When we arrived at the hospital, it was difficult to find my mom. It was difficult because they didn’t tell us where they were taking her. Eventually we were told that she was going to have x-rays taken.
When they were done with the x-rays, they told her that she had a double lung bacterial pneumonia. Also, they said she was way to sick to go home. They needed to keep her overnight and she could maybe go home the next day. Overnight, she got worse. Her fever wasn’t breaking. Her fever had been 105 degrees consistently. Everyday after school, I would go to the hospital to see my mom. And everyday she would continue to get worse and worse. The doctors at the hospital didn’t have an answer for the questions we asked. They were just as baffled as we were. One day led to another night stay with my mom’s condition deteriorating.
On day three, they told my grandparents that they needed to call in an infectious disease specialist. The specialist declared, “because of her age and overall health, she should be getting better. Instead, she continues to get worse. ” They were trying to decide if they should run additional tests to see if anything else was attacking her immune system. Then, my grandparents were warned that had my mom been a child or an older adult that this could potentially kill her. That night was my mom’s worst night at the hospital. She was up all night, vomiting, and her fever was still really high.
A nurse sat in my mom’s room all night with her. They decided on day four, to reevaluate her medicine. That’s when they discovered that the medicine they were giving her was killing her white blood cells. Her body was unable to fight the infection because of this. Once they changed her medicine, she started to slowly began to get better. She was told that she was highly allergic to two major antibiotics, which are Levaquin and Ceftin, and she should never take those. She also isn’t supposed to take any antibiotic related to these. She was released after six days in the hospital and went home to start her long, slow recovery.
Now that this is over with, I now value my mom than ever. Knowing that my mom almost died because of something like this, it scares me to even think about it happening again. Every time my mom gets sick, I think about that horrible week. And to this day, I still remember the sterile and clean smell of the hospital room. She now has to take a special medical inhaler when she feels like she can’t breathe. Now, I treasure life and realize how fast it can be taken away from someone. I’ve realized that time is precious and every opportunity I have to spend with someone, I should.
