My vagina has a fever?

Recently we had an 18 year old girl on our unit for a few days after her open-heart surgery. Long story short, she was mixing her drugs with some not-so-sanitary things (pond water, among other things...) and shooting those up. As anyone with a shred of foresight could imagine, pond water does not belong in the circulatory system, and she developed massive bacteremia. She ultimately became super septic and developed lots of fun things like septic emboli to her brain, spleen and lungs; vegetations on ALL FOUR of her heart valves; and acute kidney injury.

I met her after getting all of her valves fixed. Amazingly, she came through the surgery beautifully. Because she had all of her valves intervened upon (two repairs and two replacements), she was on pump quite a long time. The combination of her massive amounts of narcotics we had to give her and her probable pump head made her a little weird.

Her only complaint after surgery? "My vagina has a fever." Not kidding. She was afebrile, had no rashes or anything weird down there. But she was adament that her vagina was too hot. She insisted on laying in bed, spread eagle, with a fan pointed directly at her vagina. Pulling her gown down over her lap increased the temperature, so she kept it pulled up to her waist. And she had a basin of ice water that we had to keep refilling that she would dip a washcloth in and wet the area almost constantly.

It was a little awkward. She had a young, male nurse. He thought it was awkward. Her mother thought it was awkward. Her father thought it was really awkward. She did not think it was awkward.

This lasted for two days.