Day Seventeen - A Day in the ER

Friday August 26th
On a trip this long you are bound to sacrifice at least one day of riding to appease the motorcycle gods. Today was that day for me. I spent the better part of the afternoon in the emergency room of the La Paz hospital in Parker, AZ. Now before you get all worried (whoever the collective YOU might be), it wasn't for anything life threatening... at least not directly.

I was stung by some sort of insect yesterday afternoon as I was leaving San Diego via Interstate 8. I'm not sure how it managed to sting me considering that it slammed into my forehead at about 80 miles per hour and exploded on impact. But somehow it managed to get some or maybe even a lot of venom beneath my skin as it's last “fuck you” before dying. It was kind of itchy at first and a little swolen but it wasn't all that bad.

Things got worse over night. When I woke up this morning the swelling had dropped from my forehead down to my eye and made it so that I could only barely open my eye. An hour or so later my eye was completely shut from the swelling. At first I was just going to tough it out, I was hoping that it would get better in a couple of hours. But as the swelling got worse and worse I decided that I needed to do something about it.

I stopped in the nearest town and took some benadryl that I had fortuitously packed away in my t-bags. I also put some ice on my eye hoping to reduce the swelling. Neither worked. It was at this point that I decided that I needed to stop in the nearest town and seek medical advice. Unfortunately the nearest town was over 100 miles away so I had to toughen up and ride one-eyed through 100 miles of desert.

Riding with only one good eye is somewhat of a challenge. Your depth perception and peripheral vision are totally screwed. I would instinctively look over my right shoulder every time that I wanted to switch lanes to the right only to realize that it was impossible to see behind me to the right using only my left eye.

Despite the challenge of riding one-eyed I was mostly concerned about what would happen if the swelling continued to spread. What if the swelling crossed over into my left and couldn't see out of either of my eyes? Assuming that I could survive pulling the bike over to the side of the road without killing myself, I imagined myself blind on the side of the road trying to flag down someone to help me. What if the swelling continued around my head (which it was starting to do) and affected my inner ear somehow. Riding a motorcycle is all about balance and problems with my inner ear would almost certainly spell fatality.

Somehow I managed to make it to Parker, AZ in one piece. After scaring people with my grotesquely swolen mug at both the convenience store and a local doctor's office, I finally made it to the emergency room at the La Paz Hospital. This was my first experience in an emergency room. It didn't seem nearly as coordinated as I expected it to be. There seemed to be a gap in the communication between myself, the doctor and the nurses.

The doctor seemed to overly cautious. It seemed pretty obvious to me and anyone else that looked at me that I was suffering from an allergic reaction to an insect bite or sting. First he wanted to give me a tetnis shot since I hadn't had one recently. I couldn't figure out what the hell tetnis had to do with a bug bite. On the one hand, it was a general immunization so it wouldn't hurt to get it. On the other hand I was concerned about the price of a tetnis shot administered in the emergency room instead of a doctor's office.

Next the doctor gave me a shot of eipnephrine to prevent anaphalactic shock even though I explained that I wasn't having any respiratory problems and that I don't usually have respiratory problems when I'm stung by bees or wasps.

Finally there was a whole debacle over whether or not it was safe to give me a shot of benadryl since I was driving a motorcycle. Normally they would require someone else to drive you home after getting a shot of benadryl. The nurse was concerned that she would be liable if I was to wreck after she administered the shot knowing that I intended to drive. The doctor seemed to be leaning towards keeping me in the hospital overnight to avoid any problems. I tried to convey to him how unnecessary I thought all this trouble was. He finally backed down and said that he would keep me for just a few hours for observation and then release me if I didn't seem to be too groggy from the medication. The nurse was still reluctant.

I was pretty pissed off about the whole thing. I figured that if the benadryl made me drowsy (which it usually doesn't) then I would stick around and take a nap. If it didn't make me drowsy then I didn't see any problem in leaving. The most frustrating thing was feeling captive to these people. It' s like once you check yourself in, you reliquish all control of your life until you are released.

I did managed to convince the nurse to let me run out to my bike to get my book from my t-bags before they administered the benadryl. I spent the next several hours alternating between reading, listening to the other patients and staring at the ceiling. The tough part was that I really wanted to take a nap but couldn't. I don't think that the medication was making me drowsy but sitting in a cold emergency room and doing nothing after spending the morning riding in the hot sun would make anyone ready for a nap. I was worried that if I dozed off that the doctor would take that as a sign that I was reacting poorly to the medication and then would try to keep me overnight in the hospital. I forced myself to stay awake at all costs.

The patient in the bed next to mine was a 7 year old boy who had fallen during a seizure and cut open his chin. It didn't seem like the cut was that bad but he went into four more seizures just in the time that he was in the ER. The seizures weren't that bad, he would just go limp and lose consciousness for about 30 seconds. I couldn't actually see him through the curtains but I could hear the doctor and nurse talking with the family.

It was kind of sad to have to hear a kid in pain from medical treatment. The worst part was when they tried to feed him medication through his IV. He kept telling the nurse that the medication was burning inside of his arm but she wouldn't believe him until his arm started to develop a rash. They had to reduce the flow of the IV three times before the kid was actually OK. At one point he was crying about the pain and trying to pull out the IV but they wouldn't let him. I almost passed out just hearing what he was going through.

It also sounded like the kid was a victim of medical ignorance. Apparently he had just started a new medication within the last week and the new medication had tripled the frequency of his seizures. You could tell from the tone of the ER doctors voice that he was incredulous that this kid had been prescribed this medication even though he was trying to make it sound like the doctor who prescribed it was not a total idiot. He was also incredulous that they were seeing just a general family practitioner for seizures this bad instead of seeing a neurology specialist. Poor kid.

I did do a little bit of hiking this morning. I got about 200 yards down the trail before realizing that a) I wasn't very well prepared for desert hiking and b) it was really pretty stupid to hike 3 miles into the middle of the desert with the problems that I was having with my eye and face. I guess that I'll have to make a trip back to Joshua Tree some other time. I'm guessing that a spring or fall visit would be much better than a summer visit anyway.

I had hoped to at least drive through the park since I wasn't able to hike through it, but it turns out that the road through the park was closed for some reason. The road was only open to the visitor center and campground. Later in the morning I also discovered that the highway that ran past the North entrance of the park was also closed. Now I'm really curious to know what was going on. It was fun to cook up conspiracy theories. Was there an alien landing in the park? Was the border patrol searching for some illegal Mexicans in the park? I suppose that if I could get online the park web page would tell me exactly what the reason for the closure was.

Tonight is my last night on the road. If all goes well tomorrow then I should be home in the later afternoon or early evening. It's been a fun trip but I think that I'm ready to be home. I'm a little bummed that I'm spending my last night in a Motel 6 instead of at a campground but I guess such is the nature of medical misfortune.