leslieseesincolor

Hahaha not from the future, I'm already on 2016 thinking because at work we are planning for the future year, I'm used to typing 2016, and thought I was backdating by writing 2015! I'll have to fix this.

For about 6 months after getting out of the hospital I had a lot of follow up doctors appointments, and they were running tests just to see if anything abnormal ever popped up. For a month they were doing weekly blood/urine tests, but nothing that strange ever showed up. I still had my weekly appointments for a while after that, but those were just as much check up as they were fixing some other issues I had from the long hospital stay, as I mentioned in another comment, my on-going stomach pains and things like that. I also had a lot of follow up chest x-rays just to check how my lungs were healing. I also had PT for about 4 months after I was released, partially just to get me back up to strength and partially to monitor how my body/lungs responded to activity and how they were healing. This basically just meant that I did normal PT stuff (walking on treadmill, riding the bike, doing different balance/easy strength training stuff) and getting my oxygen levels, pluse, etc at regular intervals.

My doctor has told me that we'll probably never know what it was, like you said it was most likely just a virus that we have no real tests for that came and went.

I always say that this experience was way worse for my mom than it was for me... I really don't remember much of the scary parts, and she was there for them all. She took almost a month off of work and never left my side from the day I was admitted until the day I was discharged.

Thanks! I think initially the hardest thing was accepting how weak I had become, and that I couldn't do a lot of the things I had before I got sick. I remember being in the hospital still and asking my mom about going on my snowboarding trip I had planned the next week, I really thought I was still going to be able to go, despite the reality that I could barely walk. Similarly, returning to school the next semester was really hard, I really couldn't go out and party with my friends like I had, besides not being allowed to drink, I could barely stay up past 10pm, so there were a lot of lonely nights in.

The very best thing I did after getting home was going to see my favorite band with my brother in January. My mom/doctors really didn't think I should go, but my brother had bought me tickets for my birthday in June, so I had been waiting a long time for this concert and was determined. I was in a wheelchair, and we got to sit in an awesome balcony section right above the band. It was such an amazing experience, not just because I got to see my favorite band, but also it was like my first time getting out of the house, being independent again and it felt great!

I don't know if I was specifically tested for that, but I was tested for pretty much everything (autoimmune, cancers, viruses, etc), so I wouldn't surprise me, although my symptoms don't match up with that too closely.

Yeah, when I first got the hospital bills it was really shocking... It was honestly really stressing me out that at 20 years old I could be in that much debt just for trying to stay alive...

I applied for financial aid from the hospital, and was originally denied, which sucked. A couple months later I called their payment office to talk about payment plans and that kind of stuff, and the woman was shocked that I was denied aid, and told me she would have someone re-evaluate my application. I was eventually incredibly lucky that the hospital was able to give me 100% medical coverage for the next year. So this covered all of my bill, and all of my follow up care/PT/appointments.

Despite this I've still had some outside expenses, most notably from a private GI specialist that I have been seeing. I've still had some insurance problems, mostly related to turning 21 and my eligibility status, but overall it hasn't been too awful, after those first couple months.