It took me all of two and a half weeks living in London to have to take a trip to the emergency room. It happened on Monday. In between classes I had decided to put in a load of laundry. Afterwards I came back up to my room. Within five minutes, my right hand felt like it was on fire. I ran to the bathroom and immediately washed my hands. By the time I came out from the bathroom, both my hands were as red as a bottle of ketchup and the rash was rapidly spreading to my wrists. I immediately picked up the phone and called my mother back in the United States to inform her that I was having some weird allergic reaction and that I thought I had to go find a hospital. She agreed. I called up OH and asked her to come with me to find a hospital since I was really starting to panic and didn’t want to go alone. By the time I was off the phone with her, which was no more than a minute, the rash had spread 3 inches up my arms and on my face around my mouth and nose.

I met OH outside my flat a few minutes later and we head out to Student Health Services on campus. Unfortunately the doctors were gone for the day (this was at like 3pm.) The receptionist told me to go to the Walk-In center by the hospital. That was about a fifteen minute walk from campus. During the walk, the rash started spreading up both my arms. By the time I got to the Walk-In center it was up to my shoulders. The Walk-In center took me immediately due to the severity of the case but once they got me into triage they quickly realized it was a bit too severe for them to deal with so they told me to walk to the emergency room or the “A&E” (accident and emergency) as they call it in the UK. I walked over and gave my name to the receptionist. She told me to sit and wait for triage. After waiting for 5 minutes the pain from the reaction was really starting to take its toll on me. I was getting a little light-headed and I swear if OH wasn’t with me I would have been hysterical. When the triage nurse came out, I explained that my mouth and throat were starting to get affected and that I was afraid the reaction was starting to internalize.  Also by this time, the rash had spread to my ears, stomach and back.  

Luckily, being asthmatic often has its perks, and the threat of the reaction starting to internalize meant I was taken into triage next. The doctor in triage examined the rash (with no gloves which was incredibly weird.) He took my vitals which were dropping a little since they were taken in the Walk-In center and wrote instructions on my file that I should be given an anti-histamine immediately.

Now in the United States, you don’t have to walk by yourself to a doctor. But here in the UK, the doctor in triage told me to follow the yellow tape on the floor and hand my file to a nurse at the end of the yellow tape. Of course the yellow tape had probably been there for years and eventually wore off so OH and I wound up in X-Ray by accident. The technicians in X-Ray pointed us in the right direction and we found the end of the yellow tape. The nurse looked at my file and immediately administered an anti-histamine before even getting me into an examination room and examining me. OH and I just sat in a chair for a while, waiting to be called into a room. Within twenty minutes the rash finally started to lighten and disappear. I was then finally called into an examine room and was examined. The nurse took a full medical history and decided on a further course of treatment. She also decided I should wait in the ER a bit longer to make sure I didn’t relapse and get worse.

After at least an hour she came back and told me I could go into the discharge room and wait there until the discharge nurse was convinced that I was well enough to go. The nurse gave me more medication to take immediately and more to take home with me to continue to take for the next few days. After another half hour I was finally allowed to leave.

I was completely exhausted, weak and still in pain but I was so glad to almost be in my own bed. I, of course then had to re-wash all my clothes with a different gentle detergent wearing rubber gloves and so it was another 2 hours before I could finally lie down.

Things I learned during this experience:

  1. Doctors in the UK don’t wear gloves when they examine you. No one wore gloves at all. It was so weird. There were full boxes of gloves everywhere but no one seems to wear them.
  2. OH is a good friend and stayed with me through the entire hospital experience even though she was hungry.
  3. If you don’t take your clothes out of the laundry room within 5 minutes of it being done, some animal takes your clothes out of the washing machine or dryer and throws it on top of another machine or on the floor.
  4. Non-biological laundry detergent does not mean hypo-allergenic.
  5. No one in the hospital questioned who OH was.  They didn’t care that she came with me into triage, or the examination room or anything.