The one admittedly dubious plus about having a medical order stamped “BRAIN INFECTION”: it gets you service.

A little over a week ago, I woke up with double vision, worse in the morning and at night. I gave it three days, figuring something about my heathen lifestyle was simply catching up to me. On Friday, I casually took the continuing problem to the doctor.

What they saw, I still don’t fully understand. I hardly had time to react when the doctor signed an inpatient order, told me to call my wife, and before I understood what had happened, had me on my back in a Stryker cart, my only view a jungle of white ceiling tile and automatic double doors, with orders to get floated in a sea of IV antibiotics to control a potentially lethal infection that had spread to my brain.

“Hours count,” I remember the doctor saying, as I lay on a tilting table meant to draw my cerebrospinal fluid down by gravity into a waiting syringe stuck into the L3-4 space in my spinal column. After that, an MRI to find less-visible culprits, and an iodine-fueled angiogram CT to look for aneurysms, before spending a night in the hospital hooked up to a bag of bacteria-killing antibiotics.
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