Tag: vancomycin Posts

Back in roughly 2007, I managed to acquire a clostridium difficile infection. It’s a really serious infection, usually preceded by antibiotic exposure, and it can often can lead to death if not treated. In my case, it mostly started out with flu symptoms, but gradually led to me being hospitalized for a few days due to loss of fluids. Once being discharged from the hospital, I was prescribed flagyl to combat the c. diff infection. I did one or two rounds of that over a month or two, but unfortunately still tested positive for c. diff. at the end of it. Since the c. diff wasn’t really responding to flagyl, I was prescribed vancomycin, which at the time was one of the last lines of defence for most bacterial infections. I did several rounds of that over the course of a few more months, and thankfully eventually tested negative for […]

Almost two years ago, I was at work one day, banging on the keys and writing some code. Suddenly, I felt cold, and realized that my hands and my fingers were shaking. I tried to stay at work as long as I could, but after a while my hands were shaking so bad I could hardly function at my job, so I went home. I curled into bed, and wrapped my duvet as tightly as it would go around myself. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t stop shivering. I ended up eventually falling asleep, and slept most of the night away. When I woke up, I was drenched in sweat, feeling like absolute garbage. Six days later I wound up in the emergency room at St. Paul’s hospital, hooked up to an oxygen mask with my finger in a pulse-oxymeter. An hour before, I was at home, […]

Today was a strange day. I woke up this morning and went down to the clinic to get the results of some tests I had done this week. If you’ve been keeping up with my saga, I somehow got a digestive infection when I was in the hospital with pneumonia a few months ago. It’s not contagious or anything – about 10% of people in the hospital get it after a week, and over 50% of people generally get it after four weeks in a hospital. You typically don’t get this unless your body is hit with a really hard broad-spectrum anti-biotic, which in my case was clyndamycin in the hosital. This type of antibiotic actually ends up killing all the helpful bacteria in your stomach and intestines, making your susceptible to other infections such as the one I got (since the good bacteria normally fight it off for you). […]