stiff

i woke up this morning with (and still have) a stiff neck. i assumed it was the result of a sleep error, but it's not the kind of pain that i really associate with that kind of thing. instead of a single irritated muscle (known here in the south as "a crick in the neck"), i felt more of a vague soreness... stiffness across my neck and down into the tops of my shoulders. i didn't spend too much time thinking much about it, though. i popped some advil and hoped it would get better.

then, in the car this morning, i reached up to adjust my glasses. the back of the right earpiece barely moved, as if it were wedged into place. weird. i felt behind my right ear and was startled to find a big raised spot that was warm to the touch. the whole area surrounding the bump was puffy and sort of forced my glasses against my ear.

i guessed it might be a bug bite, but it wasn't sure until i asked a brave co-worker to look at my head. she said it was pretty clearly a spider bite. it didn't look like a mosquito bite, she said, and though it was red & puffy it apparently didn't look like there was anything going on that i should be too alarmed about.

spider bite. stifling thoughts of an eight-legged creature nibbling behind my ear i suddenly jumped to the conclusion that maybe my neck/shoulder problem was related to this bite.

i just want to go on record right now: if i wake up dead tomorrow, you'll know why.

now, i can't say for sure that the two issues are related, but just considering the possibility conjures up memories of a trip i took to the emergency room almost two years ago...

it was july, i think, and a neighbor had advertised that she was giving away a litter of kittens that had recently been born to her indoor/outdoor cat. we wanted to get a little playmate for mimo, so ray and i agreed to ask this neighbor to come over so we could choose a kitten from the bunch.

she arrived around 5 or 6pm, when the mosquito population is at its most irritating. i stood in my driveway, by my neighbor's car, swatting at my legs and arms while we cooed over the little balls of fur. all of the kittens were covered with fleas; they were a pathetic sight. we chose the sweetest little girl kitten and took her inside.

within an hour or so i was noticing a weird feeling in my knees... like an odd swelling and weakness. by 10pm it was getting hard to walk; all the joints in my legs were stiffening. i woke up at 1am in pain, largely unable to move any of the joints in my body. my arms, my shoulders, my neck... my little fingers, my toes. everything hurt when i tried to move.

ray took me to the emergency room. i was crying i was in so much pain. but because i wasn't bleeding to death, the ER staff took their time getting to me. (honestly, it could have been a mere 15 minute wait, but in my agony it felt like 2 hours.)

when a doctor finally saw me, i told him about the mosquitos (west nile! rocky mountain spotted fever!) and the fleas (something equally horrible!) and they immediately started blood tests. those tests showed nothing unusual, so they decided to do a spinal tap to rule out meningitis. i'll omit the details of their 7 attempts and just skip to the results: also negative.

i was writhing in the emergency room all night. early in the morning they discharged me with no diagnosis. i felt only marginally better. no one knew what was wrong with me. it took me a couple of days to finally return to normal.

so, today, i am more than a little freaked about simultaneously having a spider bite and a stiff neck.

Posted by xta at May 25, 2005 05:09 PM | TrackBack