On July 21 I woke up feeling anxious and out of it. I figured this was because I had only gotten 2 hours of sleep the night before. Come tuesday morning I woke up with a stiff neck and a headache. I chalked this up to sleeping in a bad position! By thursday the headache was still there, stiff neck, and towards the end of the evening I developed a fever. I ended up going to the hospital because of the fever... which lead me to believe it could be meningitis.
I was put into isolation after they determined my fever was quite high. Here are the symptoms I went in with:
Stiff neck
Headache (worst I've ever had but it wasn't a migraine)
Nausea
Sensitive to light
High Fever
Some confusion
High pulse & I think low blood pressure. All I know is they kept telling me my stats were all over the place.
They immediately hooked me up to an IV and took some blood. They determined my white cell count was really high, I had a spinal tap which had some white cells in it but they ruled out menigitis. I was given some IV antibiotics for anything bacterial (they said to me if I had any bacterial infection, I sure didn't now!). I spent the night in the hospital while they pumped fluids in me, gave me a little bit of morphine which took the edge off my headache, gave me a pill for a bladder infection (which I did not have but they gave me one after they found white cells in the urine test). I also had a chest X-ray. Upon morning the Internal Medicine group came by and the doctor examined me. He said they don't know what it is, but it's a viral infection. I was told to monitor my symptoms and come back if anything gets worse, and they'd call me if they found anything in the cultures they were doing.
I spent a week in pain; wasn't able to sit up for periods of more than 10 minutes. The next week I was tired and achey but felt I was doing much better. I went to my own GP who ran the white cell count test again and that came back still on the high side. I spent a lot of time looking up what it could be and discovered that Viral Encephalitis fit everything I had--execpt the vomitting but that's probably due to the fact I wasn't eating. It took 2 more tests over a period of 2 weeks for the white cells to drop back within a "normal" range. Now, I feel some confusion, do have some memory problems (doesn't bother me to the part of freaking out, but it's apparent it's there), and I've noticed I have trouble with my speech and trying to get words out. My doctor was surprised that they did not give me a brain scan and I was equally surprised when he did not send me to get one done. He ruled it a viral infection, possibly menigitis.
I guess my question is with Viral Encephalitis, how long is the recovery period; do they have specific tests to say it was Viral Encephalitis? I was not around anyone sick and the only thing I can think of was a mosquito bite (which had flared up but I didnt think anything of it since i'm allergic to them). I'm going into my 4th week of this general feeling of not being myself.