synergy

False Alarm

I need to write this quickly as I'm heading to the gym as soon as I finish.

Yesterday was a miserable day. Not only is it unbelievably hot and humid suddenly, but K had a bad scare with her heart. Thursday wasn't the best for her. She found out that instead of a permanent assignment, she will be receiving a temporary assignment at work. She was home sick still fighting the bad cold that she's had for 10 days, and right after she heard from her office, her ex-husband called. His mother is in the hospital and has been diagnosed with late stage bone cancer. Strange that after being divorced 7 years, and K living far away for 6 years, he still calls her first whenever a crisis occurs. So K was doing alright on Thursday evening, but she was upset by all the bad news.

Friday morning around 2:30 am, she awoke (and woke me) clutching her chest in pain with what she thought was bad indigestion. Her lithium gives her incredible heartburn, so she takes prevacid daily to combat it. Due to her cold, she was also placed on z-pack antibiotics, which also didn't seem to be agreeing with her system. I gave her several over-the-counter meds, but nothing seemed to help the heartburn. Finally, she asked me to give her nitroglycerine, which she has for her heart. At this point, she assumed that she must be having another heart attack, since nothing else was helping.

The nitro worked in 3 minutes and we both fell back to sleep. At 5 am, she was awoken with the same pain and took another nitro tablet. At this point, she announced to me that we were going to have to go to the ER to have her checked out, as she assumed the nitro would only help if her problem was heart related. I convinced her to let me shower first, and we headed out the door at 6 am for the ER.

We've had a number of visits to the hospital, since K's heart attack. Some of definitely been better than others, and yesterday was one of the worst. First, they couldn't insert the IV tube. They tried twice, and K ended up bleeding on her gown. Then she went into a panic attack and wanted to leave the hospital. That occurred a couple of times throughout the day. I convinced her to stay, but she wasn't happy about it.

Finally, after we had been there for 5 hours, and there was NO ONE else there, other than the guy that the two police officers were guarding, we saw the resident cardiology. We had been taken back immediately and they begin to work on K. But the difficulty with the blood drawing slowed everything down. Additionally, we were told that she would, at a minimum, have to spend Friday night at the hospital for observation. K wasn't happy about any of it.

The most interesting piece of news from the cardiac resident was that the nitro would have also eased pain from extreme heartburn. Apparently, the nitro relaxes any smooth muscle. K and I began to realize that we might be in the hospital for nothing.

Then they took her off to the heart center and move her upstairs around 11 am. I took the opportunity to head home (only about 1.5 miles) and let the dog out and pick up some food at Whole Foods. I HATE the hospital cafeteria. It's only a college campus so the campus center is only 1.5 blocks away, but I figured Whole Foods was a better choice.

I returned to the hospital at 12:30 pm. K wasn't on the cardiac floor yet, though I had been told she would arrive there in 45 minutes. Finally, at 3:30 pm, she got upstairs. They had worked her in, and she had been given a stress test, which was looking normal. We were becoming more and more convinced that this was not heart related. Meanwhile, K hadn't had any of her daily meds. Her lithium is an evening med, so she wasn't off that, but the rest of her medical routine was being severely disrupted.

After being in the room an hour, and we had made sure to request a private room, a nurse finally showed up. She asked K a number of questions, but she didn't really listen to the answers. Instead she would interrupt if K tried to elaborate. I could see K's frustration rising. Then they wanted to perform another blood draw, which brought on another panic attack. Nor would the nurse give K any anti-anxiety meds. K asked for xanax and the nurse said she would look into getting her something. Once again, K was ready to walk out the door. At the peak of frustration, the nurse came in and said that K would be released that evening.

Basically, we went through an absolute day of hospital hell for bad heartburn. We aren't sure if we should be grateful that it wasn't anything more serious or if we should be pissed if we both wasted a day when we could have been in the office. The sad part of the story is that the experience was bad enough that K will really think twice before she returns to the hospital with any type of pain. The other good part is that we now know for certain that there has been no detioration of her heart problem. Everything is the same as it was at the time of the heart attack, 2.5 years ago.

Okay--the gym opened 15 minutes ago, but I wanted to finish my post. I'm out the door. Sorry for the spelling errors, I'm using Safari, which doesn't really work with Blogger.

posted by synergy @ 6:52 AM