ER - the cure for pain

The prospect of a child free weekend with no commitments was obviously too much for me to handle. It threw me into a tail spin of stress, resulting in my spending last night in emergency at the local hospital, hooked up to a cardio machine, receiving regular injections of morphine, and periodic EKG tests.

Yep. Everything is fine, as it turns out. The official diagnosis? "Sometimes people just have aches and pains that cannot be diagnosed".

HB was out on Sunday, doing his usual Sunday thing (exercise, paddle, band practice). I was at home, studying, determined to get a jump on this week's assignments so I wouldn't be stressed. I had been to Mass earlier in the morning, and had noticed that I was having a hard time catching my breath. As I studied, I became aware of a tightening across my chest, up under my armpit, and a tingling painy kind of sensation in my left arm.

I of course did what every sane person does. I ignored it.

But it wouldn't go away. When HB called at 3:00 to see how things were going, I described my physical state to him. He immediately ordered my ass down to emergency. I am so not a drain on our medical system. I'm the one who had to be reminded that telling one's repro specialist when one miscarries is standard practice, remember?

Anyhow, down I went, feeling quite foolish. As I sat in the chairs waiting to speak to the triage nurse, I noticed the woman ahead of me was crying. Her husband had dropped her at the door while he parked the car. Seconds later he came running in, and very protectively stood beside her. In an instant, I knew. And I was right. She was pregnant and was having a bleed. I knew all too well what they were going to experience next as this was the exact emergency room we went to when I had my first bleed with Brodie.

I am seen after them, and state my case matter of factly. I hate those "on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being least and 10 being most painful, how would you rate your pain" questions because I always feel like there are right and wrong answers!

I must have given the right answers because I watched the young couple looking at me curiously as I was taken right back and they sat, bleeding, in the chairs of the waiting room.

So...note to self. If you ever present at an emergency room as a middle aged, overweight woman who says she's having pressure in the chest area, be prepared to camp out! I arrived there at about 4:00 p.m. Sunday and got home at noon on Monday.

I gained a whole new admiration for emergency room staff.

The elderly gentleman (Cecil) in the 'room' next to mine came in with a bleeding hernia, a distraught family including a 7 year old grandchild, and no chance of survival. He died alone at 7:30 a.m. after the morning shift inserted a cathetar, and only one hour after his son had left him to go home for a few hours.

A young woman was brought in by her mother. She had taken a shitload of some kind of drug that made her entirely too chatty for 3:00 a.m. Apparently she hates social services because they took her kid, and her mother is an idiot. These were the two items repeated over and over again most of the night.

Then there was the old doll in another curtain who was completely disoriented and a carrier of something that required the nursing staff to don new gowns and masks every time they went in to see her. I can't remember the acronoym and wish I could because I meant to look it up to see what may have been floating through the ER last night....Cecil in the next curtain was a carrier as well. Anyhow, this elderly woman woke up every 20 minutes and yelled "NURSE!" very loudly. Then the very loud nurse would don gown and mask, go in and tell her where she was, what time it was, and that she needed to get some sleep.

Or how about the obviously drugged up kid that was brought in by ambulance that punched the young doctor, who was already having a lousy morning, square in the nose? This punch caused said young doctor to yell "sit down and shut up ... and get me security NOW". Yet he still finished treating the kid and writing up his chart.

And of course, the young couple who had come in before me, had to wait to be seen, and then were sent home long before me because, after all, we've all heard what they were told. If you're going to lose the baby, there's not much we can do. Go home, take it easy and monitor yourself. I watched the young husband gently lead his sobbing wife back out through the automatic doors and I said a prayer for them and their baby. Maybe they can be the ones who defy the odds. Please.

And in the midst of it all, there I lay ... hooked up to a blood pressure cuff, iv in my hand (ouch), wired for sound to that cardio machine, and tripping on morphine.

Sometimes people just have aches and pains that can't be diagnosed. There were a lot of aches and pains there last night - few of the medical but many of the loneliness kind.