The Infection That Won’t Go Away

I wanted to write a quick update to let all you readers know that I am still alive and am recovering from many hospital admissions these past few months. It has been a struggle for me physically, mentally and emotionally. I have even lost about 40-50 pounds while fighting, but I am trying to hang in there.

Along with all of my health issues and multiple illnesses, I am currently fighting a major bacterial infection that I acquired from contaminated IV fluids called, Sphingomonas paucimobilis. I was receiving these fluids as part of my treatment, but because of my lack of immune system my body was not able to fight this particular bacteria.

This bacteria should have been easily taken care of with antibiotics but unfortunately for me this was not the case. I feel like my body is actually breaking down. It’s like my organs have finally decided they no longer want to work and they are tired of fighting. Because I have no immune system to fight off the bacteria I have been on antibiotics for the past eight weeks and am scheduled for another four weeks. I currently am hooked up three times a day to my PICC line for the IV antibiotics and I can’t wait to be done with them. My veins are no longer usable in my arms to take blood from so they have been taking samples from the veins in my feet. I can’t begin to describe how painful this is, and they also run IV sites when needed in this location as well. The worst thing about it is all the sites get infected because of this bacteria in my blood.

As you can imagine I am exhausted and weak, and have been instructed to sleep as much as possible. Hopefully with this rest my body can fight off the infection and I will be back to writing as soon as possible. In the mean time I am hoping to have a couple of guest writers  who will talk about their life experiences. These entries will be about their journey with a brain tumor, or experiences with the hospital and being sick. Some might just be about living life in general while others hopefully will just be funny tales to make us all laugh.

I hope that you all stick around even though the blog entries are not as frequent while I am trying to recover. One thing I will try to promise to work on is some of my bucket list stories that will be sure to make you laugh and cry. I am trying to make the blog more uplifting like it was at the beginning before I was so ill. One entry I promise to write about is my new tattoo and the meaning behind it. My tattoo was inspired by the ten week stay in hospital recently and is a great story.

Thanks for sticking around.

Pamela