Impromptu Hospital Visit

Poor ol’ Charlotte

Oh my days! What a week! Charlotte has been very unwell for the past couple of weeks. The difficulty with her is that we are never sure whether any pain she feels is chronic pain from her FND and Fibromyalgia or whether there is a specific reason for it – as in something is actually damaged. The FND means that the wiring in her brain is up the spout and gives her pain signals when there is no actual reason for the pain. That doesn’t make her pain any less real but it does mean that nothing is needed medically speaking. She really understands the nature of her disorder and rarely takes pain meds anymore, simply telling herself there is no damage so the pain is not signalling anything. She is amazing!

Pain

However, over the past ten days or so, she has experienced pain so bad it had her up all night crying. She had already gone to the doctors to check the pain in her ear was something other than FND and was diagnosed with a nasty ear infection and given antibiotic spray and steroid spray. That night she was up crying all night. I phoned the doctor in the morning and she got an emergency appointment.

Infection

Unfortunately, the infection had progressed into the surrounding tissue and she was diagnosed with cellulitis, a super painful condition. She was immediately put on high dose antibiotics and a bucket load of codeine. Over the next few days her pain improved somewhat until yesterday when she began getting pain in her other ear. The infected ear was now leaking pus and blood and she was nauseous, deaf in both ears and dizzy with a pain which was getting worse. Given she was still on eight tablets of antibiotics each day, with more than double that of codeine, the pain really should have decreased. Charlotte also hadn’t eaten anything since Friday as she was in too much pain and couldn’t open her mouth to eat. She was then sick. The vomit was dark black indicating a possible bleed of some sort. I phoned the doctor.

A and E

They saw her pretty much straight away and immediately sent her to A and E (not our normal A and E but one about an hour away) with a letter asking for a referral to the on-call ENT specialist, concerned that the infection which should be clearing up was progressing to her other ear which also looked inflamed. So at 5 yesterday, we headed up to A and E. Even with the letter we had a five hour wait.

Anyway, she saw a lovely ENT specialist who hoovered her ears of all the pus, blood and wax build up. This got rid of the pressure which was building up and she immediately felt better. She could hear, the pain improved, the dizziness subsided and the nausea went away. He also reassured her that there was no evidence of cellulitis anymore and that the antibiotics had done their job. He thought there may be evidence of a fungal infection in addition to the bacteria one and gave her a course of anti-fungal spray to put in her ear. And then we went home, where she ate for the first time in four days. She has been asleep ever since.

Deep breath. Being a mum is super hard some days 😞