As you all know, I was very ill not too long ago.

I came home from work on Tuesday afternoon feeling a little tired, but otherwise fine. I took a nap, and when I woke up, I was dying – shivering uncontrollably and running a fever over 102. I began throwing up that night, and couldn’t keep any medicine or water down. The fever got up to 103.5 that night.

I have never been seriously ill before, and S and I were not a fan of going to the ER, so we tried to treat it at home. The next day I was still sick, so we went to an Urgent Care facility, since I don’t have a general practitioner here yet. At the time, I had managed to keep some ibuprofen down, so my fever had broken and I wasn’t vomiting. They sent us home thinking it was a virus. The next day was even worse. We went back to Urgent Care, and they sent us straight to the ER.

I learned some interesting facts about the human body.
First, high fever by itself causes dehydration.
Second, dehydration causes your heart to beat faster.
Third, normal heart rate is 80 beats a minute.

When I checked into the ER, my heart was beating at 173 beats per minute. I was very dehydrated.

So an EKG and a cat scan later, I was moved up to a room. I spent the next few days sleeping, drinking tons of water, and having an IV pump fluids back into me. The worst part (other than having blood drawn 9,000 times) was that I had to wear a heart monitor the whole time, which was a lot of wires going every which way.

I’m feeling much better now.

(My IV had to be put in my left arm, a few inches above my wrist. Here it is all wrapped up for my shower.)