Monday, November 02, 2009

4 injections later.....

After 90 minutes and 4 injections later they finally send me home.....

That was what happened 2 weeks ago, on the way back from coast to Canberra I got allergic reaction from prawn oh nooo... I know that I'm allergic to crab but I usually eat prawns and there is no problem, well maybe they didn't grill it properly or I don't know maybe my body was in its low level because of my flu and cold weather. I started to feel it 1 hour after lunch and mind you Australia is not like Indonesia where every city/town is close to each other. The closest city from Kioloa is Braidwood and it takes about 2 hours driving and how the hell I can stand with the allergic. At first I feel the itchy and then comes the rashes and after that the burning sensation and redness all over my body. We were aiming to go to pharmacy just to get something to reduce the symptom, but again this is Australia not Indonesia where some stores are close on Sunday arghhh....

Good thing we found a hospital in Braidwood, and when the nurse sees me she was in panic mode and call the GP to treat me right away. One of the benefit to have Medicare is that we don't have to worry about the hospital cost.
This year in total I had three allergic reactions, 2 was happened when I was still in Jakarta and I went to MMC and St Marie in Wijaya. The treatment was different to one another. In Jakarta they just give me injection and send me home, but in Australia after they gave me 1 injection they still monitoring the effectiveness of the injection whether it reduce the symptom or not. And when the GP didn't satisfy with the reaction he gave me another injection and another and another, in total he gave me 4 injections and 1 steroid tablet. The GP wants to make sure that all the redness, rashes and the burning sensation has gone and the reaction will not appear again before he send me home. So we have to stay at the hospital for 90 minutes... and the GP checks me every 5 minutes...

The GP prescribed Epipen for my allergic because he said next reaction will be worst than this, right now I'm officially anaphylaxis :((. In Australia anaphylaxis/ acute allergic is a serious condition and they take it seriously.

And since I moved to Australia GP has diagnosed me with Rheumatoid arthritis and Anaphylaxis.

Why here and why now?

Is it because the health system is so much better than in Indonesia or is it just my poor health condition?

2 comments:

Finally Woken said...

Goodness, you didn't tell me about this! Hope you feel much better now. I had the similar one back in uni, but it was more serious, as 10 minutes after eating the prawns I got anaphylactic shock. I told mom I might have an asthma attack as it's getting difficult to breath, and mom said wait for dad (who's at home but had some guest) to examine me. But 5 minutes afterwards mom turned around to see I could hardly breath and my face was already blue. Dad's doctor but he didn't have proper medicine so they took me to the nearest hospital, but it didn't have oxygen tank ready (it's empty!) and by seconds I was about to faint and stop breathing. So dad ran to the chemist, yelled at the staff, got the medicine, and injected it into me. The nurses only watched helplessly all along. It took only several minutes before my breathing came back to normal.

I was lucky because dad is a doctor and he knows what to do. If not, I would have died at the hospital.

You're "lucky" it is just rashes and redness so your body reacted stronger and your immune system works better than mine. But do not underestimate what your body has been trying to tell you. Whenever you feel not 100% or unfit, stay away from fancy food!

Lorraine said...

I hope you are doing ok now. It is something you have to deal with but yet it would be uneasy for you to control what's inside your food before eating it.

What I know is that allergy can be over one day. Cause when I was a child I was allergic to Tuna till I was 12 years old. After that I tried to eat some chunk and I didn't get any allergic reaction.

Take care Ky.