Well about a year ago November I ended up in the hospital and was diagnosed with Polycystic Kidney Disease. (PKD) This disease has no cure and usually doesn't manifest itself until you're in your late 40's to early 50's. Turns out I'm just soooooo lucky that at 18 it has hospitalized me twice in a little over a year. It looks like I have a very aggressive case.

Anyway, sometime Friday night I started feeling feverish, I thought it was no big deal, just a cold or something, when it went away the next morning I thought nothing of it till it came back full force Saturday night, I felt like I was on fire and yet I was so cold my body was almost having a seizure due to chills. When I could manage to get up I was nauseous and threw up twice before my stomach was empty and I ended up with dry heaves/stomach acid. I knew right then something was wrong so I called my mom and she rushed me to Urgent Care. Well after puking my guts out in their waiting room with continuous shivering half an hour later they finally called me back. They took my temperature and it came in at a lowly 99.3 degrees. Well my mom being an ex nurse knew that my constant shivering had cooled down my body so when they were away treating other people and I started warming up again my mom asked for them to retake my temp. it ended up at 105. She said my face was so bright red I looked like a crayon.

Well apparently Urgent Care isn't well enough equipped to deal with such high temperatures so they shipped me over to the hospital where I began to get even worse. The shaking began again and I was so hot I was becoming delirious. When they took my temp again at the hospital it had jumped to 107.3 degrees, now I don't know if you know this but 109 degrees is when the temperature itself is supposed to kill you. So the nurses freaked out they shoved at least 10 different pills down my throat, got an IV in my arm, and covered me in ice packs. This all took around maybe 2 hours by the way, I guess the hospital was so busy that they had forgotten about me in some little dingy corner.

After they got all that crap in me to try and cool me off they put me in a wheelchair and ended up taking a ton of blood from me to run tests and then I just spent my time waiting to hear the results, oh and I had gone through 3 bags of IV fluids during this waiting period, apparently I was super dehydrated. Shocker. When they finally got me into a room hours later they took more blood, gave me horrible tasting meds (literally it took 3 different tries for me to get these things down anyone had Potassium before? It's fucking nasty) Then they started running all sorts of tests. I had a CT scan done, an EKG, and a chest x-ray, plus whatever they were running from my blood and urine samples, I guess there was problems with my heart and blood pressure it's always either really really high or really really low. I think I went from 153/70 to 81/60 during the three days I was in the hospital. The main cause they decided was a kidney infection but they don't know how I got it or why it got so bad so fast, then they decided it's because I have PKD.

The scariest thing though? My SO couldn't be there with me, I was terrified I wasn't going to make it and he would never have known, he was worried sick about me and I thought I was never going to see him again. I didn't want to leave him knowing how our last visit ended on a kinda sour note, that would have destroyed both of us I think. I hate being sick and in hospitals to begin with and not having him to comfort me or be there to hold my hand is the worst feeling in the world. Now I get to spend my Valentines Day with a doctor and not with my SO, life just sucks.