Could Be Better, Could Be Worse

In Thursday’s blog post, I said a little bit about my stomach bothering me. Unfortunately, it didn’t get much better.

On Friday morning, I woke up with some pain in my stomach.  I talked to my proctor, and he said I should go to the program office to see what they thought I should do. They were helpful, and gave me some medicine to help with the symptoms. They said to try to go to class, but if it gets worse, then come see them. I was only able to get through the first 10 minutes of class, and walked back to the office (which was a pretty short walk) because I wasn’t feeling up for staying.

At the office, I told them a little more about my symptoms (which I’ll leave out of my blog post) and they gave the on-call nurse a call.  When she heard of my symptoms she recommended I go to the hospital.

Todd and Rosie drove me over to the ER at the Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. Todd is the Residential Life Director for the VSA, and Rosie is the director of the entire program, so I definitely felt looked-out for.  We got to the hospital, and they took samples after hearing my symptoms. Then came the waiting, which wasn’t too fun. Once the results came back from a couple of the tests, it turned out I have a bacterial infection, which isn’t great. There were still a couple of tests they were waiting on, so they decided to admit me to the hospital overnight while they figured out what exactly was wrong with me.

Hank Ingram at night, which is where I'd rather be

Erik was with me at this point, and he and I started talking a little bit about a friend of his who works at NASA’s JPL. He had already mentioned it before, but he said he might be able to put me into contact with his friend and see if I could get a tour around, and maybe talk to one of the engineers there. I think this would be so awesome, I want to be an aerospace engineer after college and work with NASA or another company on spacecraft so I’m really grateful to Erik for even considering to help me out this way.

Erik was still with me when I got moved in to General Pediatrics. There is a baby crying most of the time, which I feel bad about, but I’m also glad I asked for my earplugs. The nurses are nice, especially one of the night shift nurses named Chelsea. She always has a smile on her face, and likes talking to me.

The room is nice enough but since I’m not in the Med School 101 class I didn’t expect to spend this much time in the hospital.

The view outside my window

Around 10 PM Friday they got the first lab results back and their estimate was that I was going to be in the hospital for three to five days. Though I’m not going to discuss my diagnosis in my blog post, I will share that the doctors expect me to be fine in a few days, and that they expect I’ll be able to continue the program when I’m better.

Friday and Saturday passed in similar fashion – I was basically just stuck in my hospital room while Erik, Todd, Tamra, and Ms. Hansen all took turns watching me until my mom got here on Saturday afternoon. Erik, Todd, and Tamra are all from the VSA, and I’m super thankful to them (and Ms. Hansen) for being so great about it. They really stepped in and made sure that I was taken care of. Tamra even spent the night down the hall from my room in the hospital.

Tamra and I also talked about her research a bit too. She has a PhD in philosophy, and studies gifted youth. Although I wasn’t feeling all too great, it was interesting to me to hear about what she was working on. Her work is mostly about studying gifted youth, and developing better curriculum to teach them. She also is a co-editor of a journal that describes some of these techniques, which is what she was working on when she was with me. She was only working on it while I was watching movies on the computer she brought with her; I was able to watch Ocean’s 11 to pass some time. I’m thankful she brought that computer; it was a nice touch since I didn’t really have much else to do.

All of my classmates, Jason, and my proctor group have been super supportive about the whole thing as well. They've all told me they hope I get better soon, and my class even sent a video to me. I'm glad I'm around such a great group of people, they've made it that much easier for me while I'm dealing with this.

To sum it all up, I’m getting better (the symptoms aren’t as bad as before) and the doctors expect me to recover fully. I’ll just have to take the few days after I get out of the hospital a little easier, but I can’t wait to get back with the awesome VSA community and continue with the program.