Something of a Storm (All in Good Time Book 1) (6 page)

Chapter 9

I wish I could say that Zack Martin succeeded in taking my mind off worrying about my sister, but his gorgeousness was only able to distract me briefly. Thankfully, I had other distractions with getting to know Peter. He started to warm up to me that afternoon. We had a good conversation about art and composition, and I learned a lot even though we didn't talk about glass at all.

I made it home at 2pm that day and was relieved to find Lexi there when I arrived. "I almost called Andy to see if he'd gone with you to look at shoes," I said, smiling with relief as I walked in.

"Hello to you too," she said smiling back. "How'd it go?"

"It was good," I said. "Peter Craig is a piece of work, I'll tell you that right now."

"Uh-oh," she said with a worried expression. "Not in a bad way, I hope."

"It's gonna be fine, he's just a little hard to read. I thought at first he wasn't happy to have me there, but by the end, he seemed to be having fun talking to me." I paused for a second. "Did you go anywhere?"

"Can't you tell?" she asked, pointing at the shoeboxes that were stacked near the couch.

A wave of anxiety hit me imagining everything that could have gone wrong. "Did Andy go with you?" I asked.

"No, he wasn't home," she said. "And I'm fine." She held out her arms to let me inspect. "See? All in one piece."

I narrowed my eyes at her.

"Aren't you gonna say thanks for getting you some shoes?" she asked.

"Thanks," I said. I went to the boxes and opened them one by one, inspecting her selections. "Did you spend a ton of money?"

"They were on sale buy one get one half off." She watched me look at them. They were both black. Hers were dressy, but still looked comfortable. Mine looked like lace-up boots, which matched perfectly with my work uniform. We both knew there was no need for me to try mine on since we wore the exact same size and she had no doubt already tried them for me.

"Did you get to make a window today?" she asked, having no idea how time consuming the process was.

"No," I said. "In fact, we were at a church almost the whole time I was there."

"A church?"

"Yeah. Peter did some windows for it and they were being installed today."

"Oh, cool," she said. "I never thought about windows for churches, but that makes sense."

"They're huge. There are five of them and they took Peter a whole year to make."

"Whoa," she said. "They must have to pay a ton for that."

"Their son Zack paid for them. Peter told me on the way home just now that he started an internet business when he was seventeen and two years ago he sold it for eight million dollars."

Her eyes got huge. "How old is he now?"

"Peter wasn’t sure but he said he thought he was about twenty-four or twenty-five."

"I wonder if he's hot," Lexi said.

"He's super hot," I said nodding wistfully. "He's hotter than hot."

Her eyes got so wide that I cracked up laughing.

She shoved at me. "You
saw
him?" she asked.

"I talked to him," I said with a confident smile.

"You talked to an eight-billionaire?" she asked, totally amazed.

"Eight
million
," I corrected.

"Same thing," she said, shoving at me again. "Did you
flirt
with him?"

"If you call blushing and blabbering like an idiot flirting," I said.

She thought about it for a second. "I can't believe his name's Zack. You always end up in love with men named Zack."

I laughed. "I'll hardly end up in love with
either
of them," I said.

Suddenly, I felt a sharp stabbing sensation in my girl parts, and I made an expression that reflected the pain I felt.

"What's wrong?" Lexi asked.

"It hurts a little down there." I said. "And I've been feeling like I have to pee all the time even when I don't have to."

That was Wednesday afternoon, and 24 hours later I was at a walk-in clinic peeing in a cup so they could test me for a urinary tract infection.

They prescribed a week's worth of Penicillin in the form of 500mg pills and said that should do the trick. We had to work at the restaurant that evening, so I hoped the antibiotics would kick in. I was supposed to take 4 a day, so I took one before work and another when we got home that night.

The next morning when I woke up, I felt dizzy and out of it, but I figured it was the infection since it could take at least 24 hours for the antibiotics to kick in. I took another pill on my way to Peter's. It was Friday and the window instillation would be complete, so he and I left for the church as soon as I arrived at the studio.

We hadn't been there long when I knew something was really wrong. I got extremely nauseous and felt dizzy and light-headed. Peter was talking to Freddy in the main sanctuary when I excused myself to go to the restroom. By the time I got there, my head was spinning. My ears started ringing and my chest tightened making it difficult to breathe. I sank down onto the bathroom floor with my back against the wall.

"What's happening to me?" I mumbled to myself. There were four stalls in that bathroom, and I stared at them wondering for a second if anyone was in there and if I'd been overheard talking to myself… not that I really cared. Then I remembered that I could clearly see under the stalls and there was no one in there with me.

My head felt heavy.

I couldn’t hold it up any longer.

I decided the cold tile would feel nice, so I slumped to one side letting my cheek make contact with the floor. I was thinking about how badly urinary tract infections sucked when Kate Martin, the pastor's wife, came into the bathroom.

"Oh, hi," I said, picking my head up of the floor and making my way to an upright position. She gasped and stooped down beside me. "Honey, are you okay?" she asked in a concerned voice.

"I think so," I said. "I don't know." My head was spinning and I closed my eyes for fear that I would throw-up. "I took some Penicillin and I think it might be making me sick," I said. "I don't feel good at all."

She got right in front of me, trying to make me make eye contact with her. I tried to get myself together, but I just couldn't. I'd never been so out of it in my life. The next thing I knew, I was agreeing with her that we needed to go to the ER, and she was loading me in her Jeep.

I vaguely remembered talking to Peter on the way out. He was concerned, but Kate assured him that she didn't mind going with me. I told the ER doctor about my UTI, and how I'd been prescribed Penicillin, which seemed to be doing more harm than good. They made me do a CT scan of my belly because of the intense nausea and tightness, but it came back normal. The doctor said it was normal to have "GI discomfort" from Penicillin. He switched me to Amoxicillin and lowered my dosage to 250mg instead of 500. I was thankful for the change since I'd already decided penicillin didn't agree with my body.

The trip to the ER took about six hours, and I left there feeling slightly more alert than I was before I came. Kate stayed with me the whole time, and when it was all over, she brought me home and asked if there was anything else she could do. I refused and told her I'd send Lexi and Andy to the corner drugstore to pick up my new prescription.

She gave me her number and made me promise to call if I needed anything. I assured her that the Amoxicillin would be a game changer for me and I'd be fine by morning.

I wasn't fine the next morning. The symptoms were back with a vengeance. I hated hospitals, and wanted with all my heart to avoid going back there, but I truly felt like I was dying. My insides, from my throat to my gut were synched up in a tight knot. I could feel and see throbbing in my stomach. It was my heartbeat, but I'd never felt or seen it in my stomach before. Adrenaline coursed through my body in hot waves making me feel sick and restless. Something was really wrong, and I knew it.

By that afternoon, I made Lexi drive me to the hospital for the second day in a row. I explained the whole situation to the doctor and told him I thought maybe I was having a reaction to the drugs and needed to get on something else to treat my UTI. I told him my heart was beating out of my chest and I could see the pulse in my stomach. I distinctly remember him looking at me like I was crazy when I said that.

They gave me a bag full of IV fluids, which seemed to calm my body slightly. "Nausea is underrated," he said somewhat sympathetically. "I'm sorry you're not feeling well. But you had a scan yesterday and it was fine. Your vitals and blood work look fine. Your white blood cell count is slightly off, but that's consistent with your infection. You need to stay on the antibiotic you've been given," he said. "If we give you another one now that you've already started that one, there's gonna be issues with resistance."

I didn't understand any of that, but it seemed like he knew what he was talking about. I made sure he knew I felt sick as a dog—completely out of it.

"Sometimes it takes a little while for your system to adjust to the medicine," he said. "It's quite common for people to experience GI issues with them, especially at first."

For the next week, I took the Amoxicillin I'd been given. It was bad, but it wasn't as bad as the first few days. I could feel my UTI going away, so I knew it was doing its job in spite of the other symptoms.

I managed to go to my few scheduled shifts at the restaurant, but it was just too much for me to try to go to Peter's on top of that. I told him my body didn't agree with the antibiotics I was on, and I'd be back the following week once I finished taking them. He didn't seem to mind. It wasn't like me to call in sick, but I just couldn't function past the antibiotics.

I counted down the pills to the last one in the bottle, and felt an overwhelming sense of excitement when I took the final one. I clearly remember thinking my life was about to get back to normal as I put the last one into my mouth.

I'd never been more wrong about anything.

Three days after my last dose of Amoxicillin, I was back in the hospital. I explained to them that I hadn't been right since day one of taking those things. I told them my symptoms, which included nausea, cold sweats, anxiety, and ringing ears.

They monitored my heart, which I felt was going to beat out of my chest, and told me it was fine. They gave me a bag of fluid and a prescription for stomach ulcers, which they said had likely been caused by the antibiotics. They told me to follow-up with a GI doctor if the symptoms persisted.

To say the symptoms persisted would be the understatement of the century. I had barely been functioning during the week I took the drugs, but starting the week after, I couldn’t function at all. My symptoms were utterly debilitating. Going to work wasn't an option. Leaving the bed wasn't an option.

Lexi continued to work shifts at Miller's, and I couldn’t even muster up the strength to worry about her. It was all I could do to remain conscious. I was desperate for an explanation, so I called the GI doctor that the hospital recommended. He told me that Amoxicillin was the same as Penicillin and he couldn’t understand why they kept me on it if it made me sick. He said I was probably allergic to it, and would likely be sick for the next week or so while it worked it's way out of my system.

I kept a calendar and counted down the minutes till "next week" when I'd feel better. That week came and went, and I was still sick as a dog.

I'm not being dramatic when I refer to the next six weeks of my life as a living hell. I went to the hospital three more times and saw four different types of specialists trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I had blood drawn more than five times, and only one of those times did the nurse not leave a huge bruise behind when she took it.

One of the doctors told me I had a yeast infection and put me on an extended anti-fungal treatment. That seemed to help a bit for a day or two, but my symptoms quickly started again, maybe even with more intensity than before. I'd looked into the symptoms of having a yeast overgrowth, and a lot of things I was experiencing seemed to correspond with what I saw.

My symptoms were so severe and debilitating that I was convinced I had this rare type of yeast infection that got into your bloodstream. I mentioned that to one of the doctors I saw and they told me that was a ridiculous notion and I was probably just having anxiety.

Two different doctors gave me Xanax for my anxiousness even though I explained that the anxiety I was feeling was more like electrical zaps of adrenaline and was only a result of the medicine I'd taken.

The GI doctor told me I probably had IBS on top of some ulcerations and gave me a prescription for that as well.

Any medicine I took only made my symptoms worse. I couldn’t even take a supplement or a mulit-vitamin without my system going completely haywire.

It had been two months since I started the antibiotics, and my body had been in utter chaos since then. None of the doctors seemed to believe or understand that I could simply be sick from taking antibiotics. They all just treated me like I was overreacting to some discomfort and threw more prescriptions at me.