Then we talked about rates of infection, which is why I’m feeling kinda relaxed here. HIV is a tough virus to catch (compared with hepatitis, which is the one that worries me). If I were to stab myself with a needle after drawing HIV-positive blood I would have a 0.004% chance of catching the virus. Swallowing a bit of blood/vomitus is less risky than that, especially as I have no mouth/stomach ulcers. With the PEP my chances of ‘seroconverting’ are as close to zero as you can get. I knew all this before I set foot in the hospital, which probably explained why I wasn’t a quivering wreck.
So far ‘only’ two medical workers have seroconverted after needle-stick injuries. I greatly doubt that I’ll be the third.
So ‘The Plan’ is that I go to see Occupational Health on Monday, and they will advise me on what happens next. I’ve been told already that I’ll have to avoid sexual contact for the next 3 months (not a hardship – I’ve managed ‘no sexual contact’ for 2 years before now) and that I’ll probably need to take 4 weeks off work due to me feeling too ill from the side-effects of the antiretrovirals.
We’ll see about that … I don’t ‘do’ ill.
Anyway, if I do need to take time off it’ll give me a chance to read some books I’ve got sitting on my shelf – and complete ‘Zelda – Windwaker’.
Gotta go now, I feel flatulent already …
I never got around to completing ‘Zelda’.
I got a lot of support over the previous post, and to be honest I would have been a lot less calm if I didn’t have my blog where I could offload some of my worries.
First, thanks to everyone who has contacted me over my ‘exposure’, I appreciate it all, even if I haven’t personally replied to you (you’ll find out why I might not have answered you a bit later in this post …).
I went to Occupational Health on Monday, basically to let them know about my exposure, and that I was on PEP. The LAS showed how nice they are by lending me a spare ambulance to drive to my appointment – GPS navigation comes in handy when you don’t know where you are going.
Occupational Health is south of the river at King’s College Hospital, which is a bit of a trek. ‘Occy Health’ took baseline blood samples, so they would know if there was any effect on my liver/kidneys/white cell count, and filled in a couple of forms about my exposure. Then they told me that they would get in contact with the ‘donor’ to see what his virus load and hepatitis status was.
Until now I always thought of ‘donor’ as a ‘nice’ word – heart donors and the like – I never really thought it would happen to include this circumstance.
During the consultation they told me that I’d need blood tests every fortnight for the next month and a half, and that my first HIV/hepatitis status check would be in 3 months, with an additional one in 6 months. Should they both be negative then I would be in the clear.
They also told me of the side-effects of the antiretrovirals that I am taking, and seemed surprised that all I was experiencing was similar to a mild hangover.
That was yesterday – today was spent vomiting/sleeping to avoid nausea/and experiencing the joys of explosive diarrhoea.
My station officer called up and asked me how I was. When I told him, he basically told me to take it easy and go back to work when I felt better.
However, there was some good news when the Occupational Health nurse contacted me, and told me that the donor’s viral load was low, that there were no resistances to the PEP drugs I’m taking and that in 2002 he was free of hepatitis. That has eased my mind somewhat.
Some people have commented that I’m taking it rather well. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that the chances of me becoming HIV-positive are less than 1 in 5 000. The other thing is that I can’t do anything now to change those odds, apart from continue to take the PEP.
The other side-effect of the meds I’m taking are that I’m having a certain ‘vagueness’: my mind isn’t operating on all four cylinders, so if this seems disjointed, I’ve got an excuse …
Even today I’m not sure that the PEP drugs didn’t permanently ‘disjoint my mind’.
Well, the PEP is still going down, unfortunately I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to the hours of 8 o’clock. Every 12 hours I need to take the pills – I start to get nauseous just thinking about it, the familiar copper taste hits my mouth and I just want to lie down.
I also seem to have lost any control over my circadian rhythms, I’m sleeping for 14–16 hours straight and I’m drowsy for the rest – doesn’t matter whether it is day or night.
At the moment the rather wonderful ‘Scissor Sisters’ album is chilling me out nicely, particularly ‘Return to Oz’ (which has a bit that puts me in mind of The Kinks’ ‘Lola’).
I am, however, losing the motivation for cooking food, not least because of the large amount of washing up accruing in my sink. It makes me feel like a student again.
Also, my PC is screaming out for a complete overhaul – I just can’t be bothered.
Well, Saturday was the last day I worked but Greenfairy (another blogger) mentioned something that I wanted to write about – but forgot, for some bizarre reason …
The first call of Saturday was to a ‘?Suspended’.*
So we hack along the road, knowing full well that because it is the first job of the day the patient is definitely going to be dead.
We arrive at the house and the FRU is there before us – I grab my kit and bound up the stairs past the daughter who called us and into the bedroom. Where a very dead lady was lying on the bed while the Rapid Responder was completing his paperwork.
One look is all you need to tell if someone has been dead for some time – and this lady had that look. It turned out that the daughter last saw her mother alive an hour ago, but that she was feeling a little unwell and took to bed. The daughter had checked on her half an hour later and found her not breathing. She then waited 20 minutes to call us as she was in such a ‘tizzy’. A quick look told us that even if we had been there when it had happened it was unlikely we could do much: various clues led us to think that a stomach ulcer had ruptured and she had bled out into her stomach.
All around the house were flowers and cards – the next day being Mothering Sunday.
No sooner than we had informed the daughter that her mother had died than the doorbell went and my crewmate went down to see who it was. It was only a bleedin’ flower delivery man, delivering flowers to the (now) dearly departed. My crewmate told the delivery guy that now, perhaps, wasn’t the best time to bring flowers but took them in anyway, hiding them in the kitchen.
Perfect!
Then we had to wait an hour for the police to turn up, which is normal procedure for any death in the home and is nothing to worry about. I then helped the police turn her body (to look for anything strange) and put my hand in a puddle of urine* – something that wouldn’t bother me, IF I was wearing any gloves.
Oh