Day 34 Unexpected Surprises

This weekend has had a number of unexpected, unfriendly surprises. I'm happy to report that I survived them and hope to have learned a few lessons as well.

I went out Friday night as I have done in the past. For dinner, I had nachos.  The plate was massive and if I ate a 10th of it I'd say that was a lot. Unfortunately, it did not pair nicely with the black Russians (2) I had. About 3:20am I work up with terrible heartburn and promptly lost dinner. 

Sleep took a while to come and when it did, it felt glorious. When I work up, though, that feeling did not remain. I felt weak, dehydrated, nauseous, and just icky.  There was a tightness in my chest. My blood pressure was 100/67 (not terrible) but my pulse was rocking at 108.  

I went to urgent care, where they hooked me up to a bag of rehydration fluids. Given my past sketchy heart history (unknown heart attack in the past) and an EKG he didn't quite like, the urgent care doc decided to call an ambulance and shoot me off to the hospital.

Let me tell you how weird it is to be riding in a vehicle backward, on a gurney, taking the curves without being able to brace yourself.  The whole experience was surreal all while my EMT attendant, a nice fellow named Jason (who reminded me of Spider Sabich)

inserted not one but two IV's into me. I was impressed. I can't even imagine what it must be like to do something like that with the ambulance going full tilt and needing to get something like an IV into an unconscious patient.

At the ER, we were swarmed. It is a very strange, and again surreal experience to have 6-8 people descend on you simultaneously, all of them asking rapid-fire questions.  Eventually, you find one voice and stick with that and spit out your story/answers the best you can until the din settles.

This trip to the ER was preceded by a call to the nurse hotline, who confirmed the urgent care was in network. The insurance company has adopted a new policy of not covering for ER visits if you just show up. I found it an interesting chain of money, as where once I could have just presented myself at the ER and now I've gotten an urgent care and an ambulance company involved.

That ladies and gentlemen is part of the reason health care is so expensive.

In the end, the ER doc looked at another set of EKG readings and said he was confident I didn't have another heart "event" and that I had nothing to worry about.

Easy to say.  Ever since I had a heart attack that I didn't know about I'm easily scared. Every potential dehydration is possible damage to my kidneys (which according to the blood drawn were fine).  It is frightening to live with a pain in your chest and not know what is going on.

So, yes, the weekend had some nasty surprises, but in the end it all worked out. I'm a bit of a hypochondriac now I suppose, until someone can detail a way for me to know when a chest pain is something to be concerned with and when it is just an everyday sort of ache and pain.