Some of you who follow me on twitter may have seen that I went to the Emergency Room the other night (well, technically, very early Saturday morning), and I just want to clarify what happened, in case it will help anyone else out there in the future.

Before I left work on Thursday prior to my two days off (Friday, Saturday), I received news that my Grandmother in Florida had taken very ill, and would likely not survive the weekend. I had fully expected that the family would make an emergency road trip to Florida in order to pay our respects and tend to related matters. Status reports throughout the day on Friday told us that she had stabilized, and Angela had to work on Friday, but we were still planning on leaving sometime Saturday or Sunday when I went to sleep on Friday night.

Angela came home later than usual that night, and I had gone to bed unusually early. She woke me up around 2:00 a.m. wanting to talk about the trip, and after that, I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I did what I always do when I can’t get to sleep: I sat in front of the computer and surfed the web.

Sometime around 3:00 a.m., my body started convulsing, as if I had a very severe fever. I thought I may have picked up a bug somewhere the past 24 hours, so I went to bed to cover myself with blankets to see if I could break the fever. After about 45 minutes trying unsuccessfully to do so, I decided to head to the Emergency Room.

At this point, my body was still shaking, my head was throbbing, and I felt vaguely nauseous. They were able to take me back right away, and I described my symptoms to the attending staff. And it turns out that the one thing that I had trivialized more than any of them was most likely what had brought me in:

A few weeks ago, I made the stupid mistake of mowing our overgrown lawn wearing flip-flops. I ended up getting a nasty little case of poison ivy on my feet and lower legs. While it mostly cleared up, there were still a couple of spots (on my right ankle and left front leg) that were being stubborn. They were itchy and a bit weepy, but that was about it — or so I thought. The patch on my left leg was actually concealing some significant swelling. What I thought was just an annoying itchy rash was actually a fairly nasty infection. And it just so happened that I was awake at around 3:00 a.m. when the infection went systemic. 

While in the ER, they had me on blood pressure meds, nausea meds, and antibiotics. They kept me for a total of about 3.5 hours and then released me. I felt much better afterwards, but nowhere near 100% (more like about 33%). I came back home and got in bed for the next 24 hours, with a few brief breaks between.

So that’s where I am now. I’ve been home about 27 hours, and I’m about to shower and head off to see my primary care doctor for a follow up.

The moral of the story: never ignore something that’s wrong with you just because you think it’s a trivial issue. If I had continued to ignore it, this poison ivy could have literally been the death of me.