Getting Sick

​Kimmy let us know she wasn’t feeling well. She was in a lot of pain, and it was getting worse. She said it had been going on since she got to China. She went to the student medical center the next day. 

She said once she started listing her symptoms and took her temperature (101), the doctor told her to go to the ER. 

Side note: Kimmy has had a high pain tolerance since birth. I think it comes from how she came into the world and had to be a fighter, and pain was something she lived with for the first six months of her life.

Back to the story. The doctor in the ER asked Kimmy what her pain level was. She told them a 6 or 7. They gave her medication for the pain. They came back a little while later and asked if the pain level had changed. She told them nothing had changed. They were baffled, then gave her more. She said she heard them outside her room talking about how it couldn’t have been a 6 or 7 if they had had to give her that much in pain meds. 

She said they kept watching her temperature between running tests and a CT scan. She said they told her she had a fever. She said she didn’t feel it. 

I suspected it was because her body and mind were so focused on everything else that she didn’t notice the temperature. 

They found she had a bacterial infection. They said her stomach was inflamed. They also said she had some damage to her stomach, which might also have made her more susceptible to the infection. 🤷🏻‍♀️

She told them she knew her stomach was probably damaged, considering how much pain she was in when she eats gluten and how long it’s taken, and is still taking, her to figure out what she can and can’t eat. Sometimes someone will say the food is gluten-free. She’ll eat it and be sick for days afterward. 

Kimmy said that even though she told the nurses she couldn’t eat gluten, they kept coming into the room and offering her crackers. 

She was in the ER for some time. She had her on an IV with antibiotics. They wanted to admit her, but she didn’t want to be in a hospital alone. The ER was thirty minutes from school, and with everyone's classwork, no one could visit her.

She asked them not to admit her. They let her go home once the pain was manageable and the first round of antibiotics was finished. She had to agree to come back to the ER each day for another IV of antibiotics. She did. 

Kimmy got a note and emailed her professor. The only professor who was worried was her Chinese language professor. Kimmy has that class four days a week. If Kimmy missed more than two classes, she would struggle to catch up. Kimmy says that she’s going to get more tutoring from her to make sure she doesn’t fall too far behind. 

She spent the entire weekend in bed, making herself food, and trips to the ER until they gave her a prescription after they said she was getting better. 

She had to finish the round of antibiotics. Then go back for another CT scan and more testing—universal healthcare for the win. 

Kimmy is now on the mend. However, she’s still feeling weak and easily exhausted. 

Because of the lack of food options, she has to cook most of her own food. The kitchen in her apartment is small and only has a hot plate because food is cheap on campus and so readily accessible that no one cooks. Most students there don’t even know how to cook. She’s had to buy her own appliances to make things easier. A rice cooker, egg cooker, etc. She’s still trying to figure out a bread maker to make herself gluten-free bread, but that appliance is harder to find.

Having to cook her own food and take care of herself at university without her parents has been hard. 

Jesse is struggling knowing his baby girl is struggling. He would be there; he would do everything he could. 

Hopefully Kimmy gets back to being healthy again soon. She’s trying to get tested for celiac because of how gluten affects her. We will see what happens. 

Fingers crossed for our baby girl. The beginning of her journey in China has not been easy. But this is her dream, and she’s not about to give that up for anything.