ER

I’m in the backseat of a black Volvo with a bumber-sticker that says, “Ithaca is Gorges!”. My feet inside my shoes are swollen and painful and burning and itching. I’ve got red bumps all over my body…
Saturday night after work I go out with a few of the guys from RuSan’s. My left shoe feels like it has a stone in it. I keep taking it off and trying to find the troublesome titbit that I’m convinced must be in there somewhere. It’s late and I finally decide to leave the partying to the pros and go home and get some sleep.
I’m home now and my left foot is really giving me trouble. I have to walk on the side of my foot. I shower and go to bed. At some point Sunday morning I wake up and get up to go to the bathroom. Both feet are sore. I’m walking on the sides of both feet and the pain is getting worse. I sit down on the bed again and a burning stinging sensation shoots through both feet. I’m freaked out now.
What the bejeezus is wrong with my feet? I’m sitting on the bed staring at them and notice that both balls are really swollen. I can’t touch them because it hurts and itches and burns. I stand up again and can hardly walk. There’s a lump in my throat and I keep drinking water. It feels like a vitamin got stuck and won’t move. I’m not sure if I smoked too many cigarettes last night or if this is related to what’s wrong with my feet. I start looking at my body and notice the red spots which have started to appear all over me. They itch. I count the spots starting with my legs. I stop counting on the right leg at 20-something. There’s more on my hands and arms.
What the bejeezus is wrong with me? I need to eat food. I have oatmeal in the kitchen. I limp to the kitchen and am very concerned that the pain isn’t getting any better. I put water on the boil and then sit down in the middle of the kitchen floor. I’m freaking a little bit now but not too much. I stand up and finish stirring the oatmeal and grope around to find a clean bowl.
Sitting on my bed eating oatmeal I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. What did I eat? What did I touch? I think I might be reacting to too many bags of trailmix which I’ve been snacking on a lot lately. I had a bag of trailmix for supper last night. And the night before. Maybe I should ease up on the nuts. Is this shingles? I just had the flu and got off antibiotics. Maybe my immune system is weak and this is shingles. My dad wrote an article about giving blood after he’d had shingles so I’ve got shingles on the brain. Maybe I’m reacting to the antibiotics.
I limp to the computer and Google medical clinics in Nashville. Everything’s closed because it’s Sunday night. I decide to go first thing in the morning. I read my book and go back to sleep. I wake up to go pee and I still can’t walk. I’m limping really badly now. The balls of my feet feel like grapefruits.
I give Tim a call and get no answer. I call Larissa and get no answer. She sends me a text a few minutes later and I send one back asking if she knows of a medical centre I can go to on a Sunday night. She calls and speaking to her I start to freak out good and proper because now I’m explaining my situation to someone and thinking how weird it sounds and we decide she and her boyfriend will drive me to the ER.
So I’m in the back seat of her Volvo smoking a cigarette and looking at Nashville and wondering what my body is doing. Jonathan (Larissa’s very cool boyfriend) is making jokes about how he was planning to go to the ER later anyway, trying to make me feel better about dragging them both out on a Sunday night.
I talk to a bunch of doctors and nurses at the ER and the consensus seems to be that I’ve had an allergic reaction to Amoxycillin which I had been taking because of a cold/flu type thing that I’d had a couple of weeks previously. They give me drugs and I go home.
I’m thinking about how something I put into my body made me sick and so I have to put something else into my body to make me better. We do very little taking out and a whole lot of putting in and I’m wondering why we don’t do more taking out or at least less taking in. There’s a constant stream of food and drink and medication and vitamins and nicotine and caffeine and ‘stuff’ going into me. All of it affects my body and my attitude and my behavior. I’m wondering if any of that means anything or if that’s just the way we are.