Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The worst days of my life

2001; Elsevier BV; Volume: 358; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(01)07057-x

1474-547X

Daniel Schwarzbeck, C-Michael Reng,

Health and Well-being Studies

Daniel Schwarzbeck (photo) is a civil servant. C-Michael Reng is an emergency physician at the University Hospital of Regensburg. Tuesday night, October 1997, I went out to a club dancing. The next day I was up at 6 am to get ready for a school trip. At about 10 am I began to feel sick. I got a terrible headache, which lasted until I began to vomit 25 minutes later. I felt dizzy, and was sent by a teacher to the first-aid room of the museum that we were visiting, where Idrifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the trip. At the end of the outing the short walk from the museum to the train station was torture; I felt too weak to walk. Once on the train I slept again, though troubled dreams and feverish chills kept waking me. I went straight home, where I lay in bed vomiting—I needed to see a doctor, but had no way of getting to the surgery. As the afternoon progressed my neck began to feel stiff, and by the time my parents got home I looked and felt terrible. My mum took me straight to the county hospital, where the doctors immediately thought I was on drugs. Having persuaded them that I was genuinely ill, they gave me a bed and then used a long needle to do a lumbar puncture. By 8 pm I felt well enough to go home, and was puzzled when doctors instead moved me to an intensive care unit. I had a raging thirst, which I couldn't quench. After my parents left at 1 am, I slept for 1 or 2 hours before I was woken by excrutiating pain. My whole body hurt so much that I thought I was dying. For a few minutes I saw the room spinning around me, then everything turned dark. I started to sweat, and soon my bed was dripping wet. I remember begging the doctors to take away my suffering, but whatever they did, nothing helped. Through a fog of pain I heard the doctor say that he was going to give me an injection to make me sleep. When I woke up I was in a different place, and my mum was standing over me asking, "Daniel, do you know me?" Of course I did. But the tubes helping me to breath wouldn't allow me to reply. While I listened to the doctor explaining to me that I had meningitis I felt confused and frightened, and when he told me that I was going to lose my toes my whole world fell apart. At that point I didn't realise how seriously ill I was; my kidneys had ceased to function and I was dependent on haemodialysis. My toes (figure) and two of the fingers on my right hand were black. I spent another 2 weeks in the intensive care unit of a university hospital, before moving back to the county hospital for a series of harrowing operations. It wasn't until my mum brought me a personal stereo that I realised that I was deaf in my left ear. During my stay in the county hospital I became depressed. I hated the staff and all the equipment that surrounded me. Every second day I was hooked up to a dialysis machine, and unable to do anything. The procedure made me vomit. However, I nonetheless felt proud when the doctors eventually implanted a catheter in my abdomen so that I could do the peritoneal dialysis myself. I remember New Year's Eve, 1997, as one of the worst days of my life. My parents were at my bedside, but I felt particularly unwell. I spent the whole night vomiting. Eventually, the doctors decided that the time was right to start transplanting skin from my legs to my damaged feet; a series of operations followed. Before every trip to the operating theatre I worried whether the procedure would work. Would my wounds ever heal? For two months I went through a series of emotional highs and lows, but was only truly happy during the weekends, when I was allowed to go home. My feet did heal, and I was subsequently sent to a rehabilitation clinic. The staff there tried to help, but I was too unhappy. When they wouldn't let me go home, I gave up trying to help myself. Whenever I was asked to try and walk unaided, I said I couldn't. I became very anxious and upset, which caused a relapse. When I couldn't cope with the situation any longer, I discharged myself, and once home, felt 100% better. I began to actually enjoy physiotherapy, and quickly learnt to walk both with the help of crutches and, for a few metres, without. Although physically I've come a long way, I still hate the fact that, despite specially made shoes, I can only walk a short distance before I have to return to my wheelchair. In September, 1999, doctors transplanted one of my mum's kidneys into my body. Later that year, I finished school, and got a job. The company that I work for is very understanding; they don't question my absent days or my disabilities. Some of my former friends are still friends today, others are not. My girlfriend, since before I contracted meningitis, helped me through my illness and continues to support me emotionally as I try to come to terms with my disabilities. My parents and grandparents have also been fantastic. My aims for the future are simple: I want to do well in my job and to improve my walking ability. If I can do that, I think I might feel like a healthy person again.