Fun times at the ER
Sep. 3rd, 2005 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melliciousRemember the other night when I said, "I gotta quit watching so much CNN"? That may have been a little more true than I knew.
Because, you see, I woke up in the middle of the night that night with chest pains. (All the gory details - more or less - under the cut.) I wanted really badly to think it was just indigestion, or too much CNN, but when my left arm started going all pins and needles I woke Rob up and told him to call 911. Apparently there wasn't an ambulance immediately available, but no less than 5 paramedics showed up in a little while (presumably in a firetruck, although I didn't see it) and stood in my living room while one of them took my blood pressure - I think he said it was 160 over something, which is high but not sky-high, right? - and gave me baby aspirin and then nitroglycerin (sprayed under my tongue) and put me into the ambulance when it eventually arrived. I was very relieved that it didn't have the sirens on; the thought of all the neighbors watching me leave on a stretcher was just too embarrassing.
In the ER, they did an EKG and took blood (from the IV that the paramedic in the ambulance had started) and hooked me up to a lot of monitors and then left me. Eventually Rob found me, and then a doctor came in and said that the EKG looked fine, but they wanted to do some more tests before they let me go - which made me dream for a brief time that they were going to let me go on home. No dice there. In fact, I might as well say now that I ended up sitting in the ER all damn day, since there were no beds in the unit with the heart monitors available and that's where they wanted me to spend the night. A stretcher gets incredibly uncomfortable after 16 hours, let me tell you.
It was pretty interesting, though. I hadn't been to the ER (well, unless you count occasionally walking through it on the way to other parts of campus) since I tore my knee up in a car wreck the week of high school graduation in 1977, and I hadn't been admitted to the hospital in even longer, since I had heart surgery to correct a murmur in 1972. Sometime around dawn, when we were sitting there watching yet more news, they brought in a bunch of evacuees from Louisiana. They told me at one point that they might have to double up on ER rooms, which might have been very interesting, but I never got a roommate. (A nurse told me later that I was practically the only person in the ER yesterday who didn't.)
Luckily I had brought The Brothers K with me, because the ER isn't exactly a place where you can catch up on lost sleep, and I turned the TV off when the morning news was over because I just don't do daytime TV. My co-workers couldn't just visit randomly while I was in the ER like they would have if I was in a regular room, but a couple of them managed to sneak in anyway. (It's handy to know people.) I finally sent Rob home to get some sleep - he had been sitting with me for 5 or 6 hours by that time. The nice ER doc wrote him a work excuse, which amused me in some obscure way.
Finally, sometime after 6pm, I got a real bed, which was good because my tailbone was protesting loudly by that time. I guess a lot of rooms had gotten freed up, because a whole miniature convoy of old ladies from New Orleans got transported upstairs the same time I did.
Anyway, the evening was uneventful. I got my blood pressure taken another dozen or so times - it had already gone down a lot during the day yesterday, and by this morning it was as low as 111/54 on one occasion - and answered another million questions about what happened and my family history and did-my-chest-still-hurt (no), and I persuaded them to give me an Ambien later, thank god, because the man in the room next to me was coughing and the phone was ringing loudly and regularly at the nurses' station, even late at night, and I don't think I would have gotten any sleep otherwise. (As it was I fell asleep right in the middle of an old episode of Stargate and I'm still sort of wondering vaguely how it came out.) Apparently I also slept through them drawing blood in the middle of the night. I did wake up, more or less, for another couple of rounds with the blood-pressure cuff, and a resident asking me more questions early this morning. All things considered, I got an amazing night's sleep.
It took me practically all day today to get discharged, unsurprisingly, and the rest of the afternoon was taken up trying to get my prescription (for nitroglycerine) filled, but I'm finally home and I feel fine. They never did figure out that anything was wrong with me - the nitro is just a precaution. I do have to have a stress test next week. Fun.
Because, you see, I woke up in the middle of the night that night with chest pains. (All the gory details - more or less - under the cut.) I wanted really badly to think it was just indigestion, or too much CNN, but when my left arm started going all pins and needles I woke Rob up and told him to call 911. Apparently there wasn't an ambulance immediately available, but no less than 5 paramedics showed up in a little while (presumably in a firetruck, although I didn't see it) and stood in my living room while one of them took my blood pressure - I think he said it was 160 over something, which is high but not sky-high, right? - and gave me baby aspirin and then nitroglycerin (sprayed under my tongue) and put me into the ambulance when it eventually arrived. I was very relieved that it didn't have the sirens on; the thought of all the neighbors watching me leave on a stretcher was just too embarrassing.
In the ER, they did an EKG and took blood (from the IV that the paramedic in the ambulance had started) and hooked me up to a lot of monitors and then left me. Eventually Rob found me, and then a doctor came in and said that the EKG looked fine, but they wanted to do some more tests before they let me go - which made me dream for a brief time that they were going to let me go on home. No dice there. In fact, I might as well say now that I ended up sitting in the ER all damn day, since there were no beds in the unit with the heart monitors available and that's where they wanted me to spend the night. A stretcher gets incredibly uncomfortable after 16 hours, let me tell you.
It was pretty interesting, though. I hadn't been to the ER (well, unless you count occasionally walking through it on the way to other parts of campus) since I tore my knee up in a car wreck the week of high school graduation in 1977, and I hadn't been admitted to the hospital in even longer, since I had heart surgery to correct a murmur in 1972. Sometime around dawn, when we were sitting there watching yet more news, they brought in a bunch of evacuees from Louisiana. They told me at one point that they might have to double up on ER rooms, which might have been very interesting, but I never got a roommate. (A nurse told me later that I was practically the only person in the ER yesterday who didn't.)
Luckily I had brought The Brothers K with me, because the ER isn't exactly a place where you can catch up on lost sleep, and I turned the TV off when the morning news was over because I just don't do daytime TV. My co-workers couldn't just visit randomly while I was in the ER like they would have if I was in a regular room, but a couple of them managed to sneak in anyway. (It's handy to know people.) I finally sent Rob home to get some sleep - he had been sitting with me for 5 or 6 hours by that time. The nice ER doc wrote him a work excuse, which amused me in some obscure way.
Finally, sometime after 6pm, I got a real bed, which was good because my tailbone was protesting loudly by that time. I guess a lot of rooms had gotten freed up, because a whole miniature convoy of old ladies from New Orleans got transported upstairs the same time I did.
Anyway, the evening was uneventful. I got my blood pressure taken another dozen or so times - it had already gone down a lot during the day yesterday, and by this morning it was as low as 111/54 on one occasion - and answered another million questions about what happened and my family history and did-my-chest-still-hurt (no), and I persuaded them to give me an Ambien later, thank god, because the man in the room next to me was coughing and the phone was ringing loudly and regularly at the nurses' station, even late at night, and I don't think I would have gotten any sleep otherwise. (As it was I fell asleep right in the middle of an old episode of Stargate and I'm still sort of wondering vaguely how it came out.) Apparently I also slept through them drawing blood in the middle of the night. I did wake up, more or less, for another couple of rounds with the blood-pressure cuff, and a resident asking me more questions early this morning. All things considered, I got an amazing night's sleep.
It took me practically all day today to get discharged, unsurprisingly, and the rest of the afternoon was taken up trying to get my prescription (for nitroglycerine) filled, but I'm finally home and I feel fine. They never did figure out that anything was wrong with me - the nitro is just a precaution. I do have to have a stress test next week. Fun.
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