I'll take my chances with tuberculosis, thanks

Wonder what could make a woman in her last couple weeks of pregnancy say such a thing? Keep reading...

Sunday morning, an emaciated homeless man with a cough that sounded like he'd accidentally inhaled a pine cone showed up in the lobby of where our church family meets. Knowing that just being treated like a human being can do wonders for your health, I chatted with him for a bit as a friend and I helped him up, got him to a couch, and got him something to drink.  He had an arm full of hospital bracelets and a shopping bag full of medications with which they'd discharged him, so we set out to help him sort them for dosing. During the process, we found in his discharge papers that he'd been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was contagious.

Not the kind of thing you want to learn about someone with whom you've been in close proximity for more than twenty minutes... especially when you're pregnant. Laid back as I try to be about most things, you'll understand why this particular issue got me worried for my baby. Was there a way to find out immediately whether I'd been infected? Was there a vaccine I could get that would help if I had been exposed?

The operator who answered my doctor's after-hours line couldn't tell me whether my circumstance constituted an emergency or not, and stated flatly that she could only page him for an emergency. The nurse who answered the 24-Hour Nurse Line on the back of my insurance card asked me a painfully long string of pointless questions about what symptoms I was  experiencing [despite my having reiterated several times that I couldn't possibly have symptoms from an exposure that had happened only moments prior]. She then put me on hold for several minutes before coming back on the line to tell me that based on the symptoms I'd described (?!) I needed to get to the nearest emergency room.

In the ER, the triage nurse asked only a few questions about me and a myriad of them about the infected man I'd only just met. "So, what exactly were you doing with a homeless man? What do you mean, he was in your church? You let sick people in your church?" [Well gosh, I almost snapped, *we* don't have a triage nurse to screen people before we let them in. Instead,] I gave her an unmistakable are-you-kidding-me look and replied, "We don't keep anybody out of our church." The questions I couldn't answer kept coming in rapid-fire succession until -- so help me -- she asked, "Do you know his doctor's name?"

I couldn't help it -- I laughed at her, out loud. At that point, the interrogation ceased. Now, I wish what she'd said next was, "you probably aren't infected, and there isn't anything we can do right now if you are, so go home." That would have spared me the afternoon-long ordeal I was about undergo. Instead, she uttered the fateful words, "I'll just need to take your blood pressure, and we'll be done."

Much to no one's surprise, after my string of infuriatingly useless conversations with paid healthcare professionals, my blood pressure was elevated. I was almost immediately called back to a room -- not because they were the least bit worried that I'd contracted tuberculosis, but because my reading had them worried I was on the brink of preeclampsia. I was only in the ER long enough to get a once-over and get warned, "if your blood pressure doesn't come down, we're going to have to take you up to labor and delivery"... right before they took another [predictably atrocious] reading. 

Before I finally escaped got discharged early Sunday evening, I'd spent hours restricted to a hospital bed so as not to disrupt the pair of sensors to which I was strapped or the blood pressure cuff that took a new reading from my arm every fifteen minutes;  I'd peed in a cup for neither fun nor profit, and I'd been stabbed in the finger and both arms for blood samples. I was only "allowed" to leave after several of my readings were back in the acceptable range (it's so cute when they say that, like they'd have any recourse if just I shot them the finger and kept walking), and even then, only on the promise that I'd put myself on bedrest until I could see my doctor the next morning. 

Given that I knew the day's readings were little more than a result of the fiasco I'd been through -- and not one to be a letter-of-the-law kind of girl --  I didn't give much thought to going to a friend's football party that night for actual relaxation in lieu of traditional bedrest. (My doctor, who summed up the situation the same way I did, had a good laugh about that when I saw him the next morning.)

And some people still wonder why I don't like hospitals...

Comments

[kristen]

(in my best scarlett o'hara)

why, i can't imagine why...

[lomagirl]

I was exposed to tb through a student while preggers. However, I was lucky to talk to more informed people, who let me know that it requires loooongg exposure to catch tb. Something like in the 10s of hours. So we were all okay. I think- cough, cough.

[mrs. n]

In the past week, I've been told by a batch of doctors and nurses that it takes more exposure than I got to put me at any real risk for TB infection.

Ironically, another group of doctors and nurses *in the same hospital* told me that because you never know who's infected and contagious, my chances of catching TB from a stranger sitting next to me on the bus or passing me on the street -- an interaction that doesn't usually take hours, even as outgoing and friendly as I am -- were just as good as during my exposure to our homeless friend, so it's a good idea to get tested every six months or so.

Repeating: "And some people STILL wonder why I don't like hospitals..."