So what happened?
To put it simply: my Darling got very sick first, which caused me to get sick from the stress and then right as I was recovering, I had an allergic reaction that almost killed me!
For a while now, my Darling has been suffering from a seemingly random and mysterious illness. It would show up in the middle of the night and cause him to stay confined to his bed for a few hours or day or two at the most and then just vanish as swiftly as it came. We were never sure what caused it and the fleeting nature of it made it impossible to diagnose since it would never stay long enough for us to show his doctor.
I honestly started to think it would stay a mystery and wished the symptoms would last long enough so a doctor could finally see we weren'r crazy. And unfortunately, I was granted my wish.
One morning, he called to tell me he had come down with it again and as usual, was far too nauseous and ill to even stand up or walk let alone drive an hour to his doctor. He told me he was going to lie down and would call me later to tell me if he felt well enough to go to work or if it would be a day-long bout. I didn't really think anything of it; five hours later, he texted me that he was too sick to sit up to talk on the phone and felt he'd have to stay in bed for the day but figured he'd be fine the next morning. However, the next day came and he was none the better, in fact he was actually worse! One day turned into two and then three and then four, each day bringing more increasingly bad symptoms.
By the fourth day, my urging and pleading combined with his symptoms wore him down and my Darling finally agreed to go see a doctor. He'd been confined to his bed and been eating nothing but daal, yogurts, gatorade and soup and finally admitted he needed professional help. He was vomitting, dizzy, light-headed, nauseous and his head felt like it was in a vice. Instead of taking him to his doctor an hour away, I took him to the emergency clinic near my house and we figured maybe it'd be a short visit and then back home. Instead, we were told by the doctor we needed to go straight away to the ER, because it sounded like he was having a stroke or aneurysm 😱!
Up to this point, I'd never driven on the freeway, but as my Darling was also suffering from blurry vision and clearly in no shape to drive, I put the gps on in my phone and somehow managed to get us to the ER. Once there, I remembered that due to covid, no extra people were allowed in hospitals and started to panic a little. Luckily, once they saw he was Deaf, they let us both in, alhamdulillah. They checked his eyes and everything: no fever, no cough, nothing they could feel or see, however, once they hooked him to the machines to check his heart rate and blood pressure, it gave off an ear-splitting screech! All eyes turned towards it and I saw it read 168 and it kept climbing! The doctors said clearly this was the cause of his head pain, but what was causing it?
A few probing questions and both his and my insistences that he didn't have high blood pressure later, they asked him to describe his symptoms again. He told them the light hurt his eyes, that this mysterious illness came and went semi-regular in his life and that it normally lasted a few hours or at most, two days. That he would feel nauseous and get an awful headache and normally a long nap would help. This time, however, neither a nap nor a good night's sleep had cured him. They asked him if he'd always had these 'awful headaches' and when he said yes, they told us he had migraines and this one was just out of control and was causing his blood pressure to rise which was causing the increasingly long list of symptoms which each passing day.
I was a bit gobsmacked. I'd long suspected they could be migraines, but his never seemed severe like the ones my friends got. And given his age, fifty-four, it seemed implausible he hadn't been diagnosed with migraines if that's what he had. Plus, there's no sign for 'migraine' so whenever I tried to explain my hunch to him, he never really got what I was trying to say. 'Yes, I know I get headaches!' he'd snap at me, 'why do you think I stayed home for work?!'. There was a relieve to finally know what was wrong with him, but I couldn't believe a simple migraine could wreck such havoc on his body.
He was given an iv drop and what was called a 'Migraine Cocktail' and we were told it would hit in a few minutes.
It didn't.
An hour turned into two and his blood pressure kept climbing and the pain in his head got worse until he was begging me to do something, anything to stop the pain. I didn't know what to do. I'd already told the nurses multiple times that he was still in pain, shown them his blood pressure readings were getting worse and they'd heard him moaning in pain and still, we were told to wait. By now, the machine read 197 as his blood pressure skyrocketed and he was almost delirious from the pain, begging and pleading with me to make it stop.
I ran to the nurses' station and told them that they simply must do something! He was suffering and that the iv drip was obviously not helping and that his blood pressure was now almost 200! This time, I saw a nurse I'd never seen before and the nurses that had been helping us told her we'd come in two hours ago and that they'd given him an iv drop but that he was complaining of pain. Alhamdulillah for this new nurse! She immediately chastised them for letting him suffer for so long and said the blood pressure was dangerous and shouldn't have gotten so high and to give him something immediately. I felt instant relief and went back to the room and told him that they would be coming soon and would make the pain stop.
A nurse came in soon after and gave him morphine and now, seeing how badly he was suffering and hearing the machine's neverending screaming and seeing its flashing screen, she seemed to realise just how ill he was. She left and after a few minutes, the morphine hit and he finally started to calm down and the blood pressure began to fall. Unfortunately, maybe fifteen minutes later, the iv bag also hit and he was high as a kite, but at least he wasn't in any more pain.
This whole time, we'd been told he needed to pee in a container so they could run some tests as well as do an mri and a cat scan since he was complaining of blurry vision and his pain and blood pressure were so bad. Now that he was high, I was finally able to get the sample they needed (tho I felt beyond shy and embarassed getting it) and we were told once the tests were run, they could procede with the scans. While we waited, he mostly slept and I looked at youtube and made dua to try and keep myself calm. When a new nurse came with a wheelchair and said it was time for his scans, I woke him and helped lift him into the wheelchair and went to take the handles to push him to the room.
Unfortunately, this nurse took the wheelchair from me and told me that they didn't want to tell me to avoid me getting upset, but I couldn't go back with him. I felt blindsided and could feel all the emotions of the past few hours bubbling up. She told me to explain what was going to happen and what he needed to do, and I did my best to interpret what was said while keeping a straight face. I held his hands for a few seconds and told him that I couldn't go with him, but that I'd be waiting in our room and just like that, they wheeled him away. I managed to keep a straight face until they were gone and I burst into tears and sat and cried. It felt (and still does) cruel to keep up this farce that I could accompany him only to have his wheelchair taken from me.
I had been told it would only be ten minutes, but this turned into half an hour and he was still gone. Panic gripped me and wondered where he was and what was going on. Why was it taking so long??? When they finally came back, he was visibly aggitated and after helping him back in bed and making him comfortable, I asked him what had happened? Why was he gone for so long? He told me that he had been confused and didn't understand what they wanted him to do, that they'd spoken to him and he'd gotten frustrated at the lack of communication. He asked me why I hadn't gone with him and then why I wasn't allowed to go? 'You've done it before,' he reminded me. I just told him that this time, I hadn't been able to, and he was so exhausted that he accepted this and went back to sleep.
When the doctor we'd seen when we first arrived came in, I woke him and she gave us all the test results. They didn't find anything wrong in the lab tests and likewise, the mri and cat scan had shown no tumours, aneurysm, hemmorhage or bleed on the brain, alhamdulillah. It had been a simple migraine that had been allowed to run wild and left disaster in its path. They advised him to talk to his doctor about getting put on migraine medicine and gave us some paperwork along with orders for him to go on bedrest and stay home from work for the rest of the week.
I'm happy and blessed to say that he's back to his old self and feeling much better, tho he still struggles with his migraines. Now though, we know what's wrong and are able to treat it. As this blog post has stretched and gotten so long, I'll write of my sickness in my next post, in sha Allah. Although we're both better, I ask for your duas ♡
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