As the saying goes, life never turns out as we planned  Wonderful things can happen quite unexpectedly, and terrible things don’t check with our calendars before descending upon us. The same is true of road trips. No matter how long you’ve been planning it or how detailed said plan is, no amount of hotel apps, plan Bs, or travel hacks can prepare you for everything. I expected there would be changes to my itinerary – I’d stay extra time somewhere I really liked, make a short diversion based on a recommendation, or drive an extra hour out to stay with a friend’s favorite cousin. But I didn’t think there’d be anything big enough to throw the trip off in any significant way.

I was wrong.

There had already been one unexpected event back in April when my folks were visiting me in New Orleans (you will get to read about it in my soon-to-be-posted blog titled, “Not Hip Enough for NOLA”). That event was big enough to delay my trip 8 days, and because of the lost time, I had to nix a couple cities from my original itinerary. But soon I adjusted and was back on the road. What happened this past June, however, has taken me off the road completely. I write this blog as I sit at the dining room table at my sister’s house in Sunnyvale, CA. I flew home to SF a couple of weeks ago leaving my faithful MINI Bluebell in my aunt’s driveway in New Jersey where she will wait until I can fly back and resume my Great American Road Trip. For now, I am under strict doctor’s orders to rest and recover. So, what happened in June that took me off the road? At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the truth is… I almost died.

This story starts the day after Memorial Day.  My good friend John from SF had timed his vacation and flew out to join me while I was in Washington DC. After a few day bumming around the National Mall,  John and I drove to Gettysburg, PA – John’s hometown – and spent the holiday weekend with his family. Before I left Gettysburg Tuesday morning, John’s family took me out to brunch at a 300+ year old Revolutionary era tavern. We met out front of Dobbins House and descended the stairs to the underground tavern. The bar, chairs, and tables looked totally authentic in rough, thick wood, and the staff all wore period costumes. I should have been in history nerd heaven – they even had porridge on the menu – but instead I was distracted because I was very cold. I chalked it up to the fact I had worn thin summer clothes and we were underground in a thick stone-walled tavern with AC going.. Surely I would warm up when we returned upstairs to the summer heat.

After lunch, I hugged John and his family good-bye, thanking them for including me in their family’s holiday celebrations. I was headed back to Washington DC alone to spend a few days at the Smithsonian Museums, but I wanted to make a quick stop at the new Gettysburg Museum (new to me since I had last been there sometime in the 80’s). When I pulled into to the parking lot, I suddenly felt very fatigued, so I decided to close my eyes for just a few minutes before going to the museum. I woke up two and half hours later absolutely shaking-freezing still parked in the museum lot. Crap. I caught a cold and probably had a fever. I knew I felt well enough to make the drive to my AirBnB in Georgetown. I had booked it for the next four days and figured I could spend a few of them sleeping off whatever bug I had picked up. I pumped up the MINI’s heater to high, as well as the volume to the soundtrack of “Hamilton,” and sang and shivered my way back to DC. I got to Georgetown just fine, but while hauling the last of my suitcases in from the car, I nearly fainted on the sidewalk. That’s when I realized two things: this was a bad flu and I probably wasn’t going to see the inside of any Smithsonian this trip.

FLASHBACK: March 5, 2017, two days before I left on my trip:

MOM: Do you have a good First Aid kit?
ME: Yes, Mom. In my glove compartment.
MOM: That tiny glove compartment in your little MINI?
ME: Its fine, it has band-aids, Neosporin, and stuff like that.
MOM: What about things like medicine? Tylenol? Sucrets?
ME: Do they make Sucrets anymore?
MOM: Does it have a thermometer? Or Coldpaks?
ME: Mom! CVS is a national chain and they know how to make ice in other states.
MOM: Well, here is another First Aid Kit that I packed for you (she holds a bag up the size of a carry-on) 
ME: Mo-om! (rolling my eyes)

FLASH FORWARD: May 31, 2017, day #2 of my illness:

ME: (calling Mom) Hey Mom…
MOM: Hi sweetheart – you sound sick. Are you sick?
ME: I’m sick. And I will never, EVER, give you hard time about First Aid kits again.
MOM: Why? What’s going on?
ME: Well, I’ve used the thermometer to monitor my fever, I took the Tylenol to help reduce that fever, and I am currently sucking on a Sucret to keep me from coughing myself into oblivion. I even broke open a Coldpaks to cool me down when my fever broke.
MOM: Oh honey, I’m so sorry. I wish I was there to take care of you.
ME: Thanks to your kit, Mom, you kinda are.
MOM: Call me tomorrow or later tonight if you need to, okay? Love you.
ME: Love you, too.
We hang up.
My phone rings.
ME: Yes, Mom?
MOM: In case your tummy gets upset from all that Tylenol, I put some Pepto in the kit as well.

All week I had a fever that would spike at between 103-104 degrees, then, after several hours, it would break only to have it spike again a few hours later. This cycle continued all week and after sleeping non-stop for three days Friday morning came and I was not much better. But I couldn’t stay any longer in my AirBnB (they had new renters coming in that night), and I also had to pick up my sister Brenda at Newark Airport in New Jersey who was flying in to play with me in Manhattan for a week. I knew it would be a very long drive from Georgetown to Newark but I also thought if I could make it to Brenda then we could go stay with our Aunt Julie in Glen Rock, NJ for the weekend until I got over this thing. To this day I have no idea how I made that 4 hour drive to Newark with a raging fever. I thank God for His grace and – on the list of things you’ll never hear people say – I thank God that the New Jersey turnpike is such a crappy, crumbling, and totally confounding highway.

On this trip I have driven across 18 states’ highways, so trust me when I say New Jersey’s is by far the worst! However, if not for the huge pot-holes, the split lanes for trucks vs. cars and center “EZ” lanes that reverse direction depending on various – and unposted – times of the day, I would not have made it. All those challenges forced me to stay alert and focused, and they kept me from falling asleep. Moreover, when you drive from DC to New Jersey, you will pass through 4 states and pay over $25 in bridge, tunnel, and turnpike tolls. My shock at that fact alone might have been enough to keep me awake on the drive. When I finally made it to Newark, I saw there was one last tollbooth at my exit off the turnpike. Now remember I was terribly feverish and totally exhausted so when the very large, mannish tollbooth lady took my ticket and barked, “$9 dollars” at me, what I wanted to say was, “You expect me to pay nine more dollars for the total craphole I just drove on?!?” but I didn’t… or so I thought.. When the toll lady’s eyes filled with fire, her nostrils flared huge, and she did a big “oh-no-you-di’int” neck swivel,  I realized – with horror – that “oh-yes-I-di’id” speak those words… out loud… to her. I fumbled quickly for my cash, mumbling sheepishly about having a bad fever and got the heck outta there quick.

Two days later at my Aunt Jules house I still had the fever cycles but now I had trouble breathing. I finally relented and let my sister and Aunt take me to an Urgent Care clinic. I assumed they would diagnose me with walking pneumonia, prescribe me some penicillin the size of horse pills, and send me home to sleep it off (I’d had walking pneumonia twice in my 20s and this regime worked both times). But after being thoroughly checked out and given a breathing treatment, the Urgent Care doc pulled my sister and aunt aside to talk privately. Well, the exam room wasn’t that big, and while I was quite sick, I wasn’t deaf. I heard the doc tell them she was a 20-year veteran of the ER and strongly suggested they get me to a hospital. I heard the words “pneumonia,” “pulmonary embolism,” and “sepsis,” and with that my sister was hauling me off the exam table, stuffing me in the car, and Aunt Jules sped us to the nearest ER.

The doc at Urgent Care had called the ER ahead of us, so I when I got there, I was brought in pretty quickly. They put me in a hospital bed in the hallway of the ER until a room opened up.  My memory of those hours in the ER is pretty vague, but there are three things that stand out: I remember grasping the arm of the nurse who attended to me and asked her to please help me feel better. I also remember that same nurse having a shout down with someone over who was gonna get the bed that just opened up (she prevailed because I was whisked into a room not soon after and immediately put on a breathing machine). And lastly I remember the look of fear on my sister’s face as I struggled to breathe through severe coughing fits while on the breathing machine. When I saw that, it finally registered that maybe this was something serious.

By Sunday evening I was admitted into the hospital’s Critical Care Unit (one step down from the ICU). My lungs were severely compromised, and I was in the beginning stages of sepsis. They put me on two different rounds of intravenous antibiotics and hooked me up to a bunch of monitors for my heart and lungs. Because my lungs were too swollen and painful, I was unable to lie down, even at the slightest angle, so the nurses found me a chair in which they could prop me up with a bunch of pillows. I would literally sit up in that chair for the next five days straight, hooked up to various respiratory machines, fighting just to breathe.

By Tuesday, after 48 hours of being pumped full of two powerful antibiotics, my lungs were no better. The only good news was I was no longer septic but they still didn’t know what I had and why I wasn’t getting any better. They ran more tests, some were just blood tests, but others were a bit painful and when you already feel horrible anything more and you just wanna give up. But by Tuesday night they finally had a confirmed diagnosis: Legionnaires Disease. I’d heard of it, but for some reason I thought it was something soldiers in the French Foreign Legion developed (thank God I kept that ridiculous thought to myself). So Brenda, who’d been at my bedside – er, chairside – from the beginning, turned to the medical expertise of Google to find out more about Legionnaires. The down and dirty version is this: Legionnaires Disease (LD) is like pneumonia’s pneumonia, or if pneumonia were a just a regular guy who works out, LD would be a huge body builder all bulked up on steroids. LD also has a much higher mortality rate than regular pneumonia, anywhere from 10%-30% will die from it (a fact my sister prudently withheld from me). Biologically, Legionnaires is a water-born bacteria that usually develops in commercial-sized air conditioners found at hotels or apartment buildings that aren’t kept clean. The bacteria grows in the moisture, the AC blows that moisture out, someone breathes in the contaminated moisture, and after a 2-10 day incubation period they are headed for the ER. The one “good” thing is that Legionnaires is bacterial and can’t be transferred from person to person. So my fear of having exposed John’s family (including some sweet elderly aunts) was assuaged.

Another fun fact about Legionnaires is that it is not only a bad deal, it is also an official CDC deal. Legally any and every case has to be reported to county officials. In fact, while I was in the hospital battling it, Legionnaires made the national headlines twice as there were a few cases from a Las Vegas hotel and a small outbreak in the upper east side of New York (ironically the neighborhood in which my sister and I would have stayed had we made it to Manhattan). So I had visits from a few infectious disease doctors who came to check me and Legionnaires out. They assured me the drugs they had me on from the beginning were the drugs they would have given me had they known I had LD from the start. They mentioned there was a chance I could get worse before I get better, but most likely I just needed to give the drugs time to work.

Ten hours later that chance became a reality. Early Wednesday morning I took a turn for the worse.

Stay tuned for Part 2
For those who can’t wait, here is a spoiler: I do, in fact, survive.