The Two Kinds of Decay

Soldiers

This is how I wound up in lockdown.

First I took prednisone for four years.

Then I had abdominal surgery. There was a tumor on my left ovary. Benign. Lemon sized. I was in the middle of my second year of graduate school, but I had to have it out. My lover and I found it in the usual way. He was lying down. I was sitting up. Then I felt a pain, and we had to stop. Later we found out he had moved my ovary.

So I had the surgery during the spring semester, and because I had been taking prednisone for four years I had to be given a bolus of the steroid to help my body through the surgery. The adrenal glands get lazy when there’s already so much steroid in the body, and when it’s time for the glands to produce a lot of adrenaline, suddenly, when the body is under great stress, stress like an abdominal surgery, the lazy adrenal glands are too sluggish to keep up with the body’s demand.

This adrenal suppression occurs if prednisone is taken for longer than seven days.

Coming out of general anesthesia, I shook so horribly that I went to the ER to make sure I didn’t have an infection. Prednisone weakens the body’s ability to fight infections, and in the previous four years I’d had a lot of them — fungal, viral, bacterial. They were hard to treat. I always had at least a couple of rashes going.

I knew, though, that if I were shaking from a postsurgical blood infection, I could die pretty quickly.

In the ER I had no fever, but the doctors tested my blood pressure lying down, seated, and standing, and saw that my heart wasn’t working very well, so they gave me another steroid bolus. It went in and in fifteen seconds I stopped shaking and felt wonderful. Euphoric. Which is normal after a shot like that.

Then my lover, who had moved my ovary, drove me home.

But in a couple of hours I started shaking again. My muscles were cramping, and the pain got so bad that we went back to the ER for another bolus.

Then the whole thing happened again. On the third ER check-in, I was admitted to the hospital.

We didn’t know yet that it hadn’t been a dearth of steroid that had caused the shaking but an overdose. And that after that overdose, of course, I had been given three more shots.

After the three shots, lying in my room at the hospital, I began to hallucinate. The condition is referred to as steroidinduced psychosis.

I saw soldiers in my room. They were dressed in red uniforms with tails and gold buttons. They were British soldiers from the American Revolution.

They were there, of course, to prevent their territory from being taken over from within. They were my blood, and the revolutionary soldiers, absent from this scene, were my antibodies.

The soldiers paced quickly around my bed, their swords by their sides, looking at the ground, but I could see their solemn faces, which showed me they would fight to keep me safe.

Despite my soldiers, I felt so agitated from the massive amount of extra steroid in my body that I was screaming. I screamed until I ran out of breath and then took breath to scream again. I got out of bed and ran in place like a boxer. I was running and screaming because I was full of adrenaline. My body had made a sensible decision.

A nurse heard me screaming and gave me a shot of Demerol to calm me down. I stopped screaming for half an hour. Then she gave me another shot of Demerol.

In a couple of hours I had been given as much Demerol as the hospital would give me, so I spent the rest of the night running in place and screaming. Since I was hoarse, the screaming was quiet.