I spent Thursday evening and night in the emergency room. 7 hours total. People puking all around me. Nurses sneaking ivs in my arm. Dr trying to push morphine on me. Waiting, waiting, waiting..... Thus my comparison to the first circle of hell (LIMBO). Anyway, as you know, I had some stents put in last week. On a related note, Robbie and I have switched to a vegan diet (this might be important info later). So I had some pain in my back that wouldn't go away and that didn't feel muscular so I called my dr and she suggested I go to the emergency room and they'd just take some blood and do an EKG to make sure my heart was ok. In and out. Lickety split. So Robbie took me. It was 5:15 and the kids were at a playdate and I figured I'd be home before it was over, certainly before their 8pm bedtime! But I felt I needed to go because I'd been freaking out that something wacky was going on with the stents for two days!
So we register and I get blood taken and an EKG with 20 minutes of my arrival (the potential heart attack always gets you triaged faster). I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake! Well, I ended up sending Robbie home to pick up the kids and told him they could pick me up when I was done (I was hoping for 9pm at that point). After the nurse came out into the waiting room and announced how sorry they were for the long waits and how they had called in extra personnel, I decided to get the hell out of there. I went up to the triage nurse and asked what exactly I was waiting for? Surely someone has seen the bloodwork by now and if I was having a heart attack someone would have alerted me in the 3 hours I'd been waiting. She said my bloodwork looked fine but given my "history" she encouraged me to stay and let the dr look at me. She said a bed was opening up as we spoke.
I know this long story is probably making you think you also are in the first circle of hell. But there's so much more! I finally get a bed. The dr. comes in and wants a chest xray, another ekg and more blood. He also asks if I want some morphine for my pain. REALLY? Morphine? I had rated my pain a 3 on the ol' pain-o-meter they have. I hardlly think that 3 qualifies for MORPHINE!! I said an emphatic NO I didn't want any stinkin IVs. Got my xray. The nurse came in to get blood and I foolishly suggested the vein in my right elbow NOT KNOWING THAT HE WAS GOING TO INSERT AN IV! Who puts an IV in the crook of your arm? So there I am hooked up to the EKG machine having to hold my harm stick straight for 3.5 more hours!
Two good things came from this: 1) I got to watch The Shawshank Redemption in it's entirety complete with commercial breaks and 2) found out the pain wasn't heart related. Did the dr. know what it actually was? NOT A CLUE. But I had an epiphany around 11:30pm after the heart was eliminated as a culprit (Is that Virgil come to lead me to Paradise?). It's the same mystery pain I had at Rutgers, once in PNG and once when I lived in Manteo. Each occurred when there was a change in diet coupled with stress. So I took a Zyrtec when I got home (which I accidentallly discovered made the pain go away when I was at Rutgers) and went to sleep. I guess it was 7 hours well spent.
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