My scary week, Part 2
If you have not read Part 1, read it now.
In the emergency room, I described my symptoms to a triage nurse. She took down my information and sent me to the waiting room, where I waited a few minutes before another nurse called my name. Allowing my wife to tag along, he took me to a room where he asked me exactly the same questions as the triage nurse. He then administered an EKG, drew some blood for a test, and sent me to the X-ray lab for a chest X-ray. After that, we sat in the ER waiting room for six hours. Periodically, a nurse would emerge to evaluate my pulse and blood pressure and quiz me about my level of pain/discomfort. To pass the time, the family and I played Word Mastermind. It took my mind off the situation and alleviated my feeling of impending doom, but I think our fun and laughter may have annoyed the sick and injured people filling up the other seats in the room.
Finally, a little after midnight, a nurse approached and said they were going to admit me into the hospital as soon as they could get a bed ready. They gave me a temporary bed in the emergency room where I could have privacy (essential once they put me into a hospital gown). A nurse gave me an aspirin, a couple of nitroglycerin tablets, a nitroglycerin skin patch, and a shot of something (can't remember what) in my stomach. She also gave me an IV feed of saline (I think) to counteract the drop in blood pressure caused by the nitroglycerin, put an oxygen tube in my nose, and hooked me up to a machine that monitored my blood pressure and my heartbeat, a machine that squeezed my arm at regular intervals and allowed me to hear as well as feel the PVCs. I waited in that rolling bed for more than an hour before they took me to a real room. Mrs. Happy stayed with me and kept me occupied as well as she could.
The next few hours are too tedious to describe. Lots of talking to nurses and a doctor, lots of blood-drawing and blood pressure-taking, and lots of the same questions I had been hearing since the moment I walked through the door. Once I was settled in my room, they gave me a portable heart monitor and a bed pan, one of which I found impossible to use (hint: it wasn't the heart monitor). Eventually, they told my wife that she had to leave since I was in a semiprivate room with another male patient. She reluctantly left and returned to our hotel to get some sleep. Upon her leaving, I immediately drifted into a state of semi-consciousness, unable to fall completely asleep but too exhausted to stay fully awake. The night was broken up by periodic visits from nurses and aids, people yelling at my hard-of-hearing roommate, and a concerned phone call from a distressed Mrs. Happy.
Morning came and brought with it a combination of boredom and anxiety the likes of which I had never known. In the past, I have thought that being in the hospital would be kind of fun, with no responsibilities and all kinds of people paying close attention to you. I no longer think that. The nitro pills and patch in the emergency room had alleviated the tightness in my chest, but it had returned in the night and showed no signs of going away. The PVCs continued unabated. The oxygen had dried out the inside of my nose, leaving it feeling uncomfortably raw and a little bloody. The array of diversions available to me reminded me of the kind of joke I used to perform with my childhood friend Chris:
Me: I was in the hospital and I had nothing to read.
Chris: That's bad.
Me: I asked a nurse and she brought me a magazine.
Chris: That's good.
Me: It was a fashion magazine.
Chris: That's bad.
Me: She also brought me a Wall Street Journal.
Chris: That's good.
Me: I couldn't concentrate well enough to read.
Chris: That's bad.
Me: There was a TV in the room.
Chris: That's good.
Me: My roommate had the remote.
Chris: That's bad.
Me: He watched some interesting shows.
Chris: That's good.
Me: He also watched five episodes of Full House and two episodes of a show that resembled Teletubbies on acid.
Chris: That's bad.
Me: He couldn't hear very well, so he had to keep the volume really loud.
Chris: That's good. No, wait. That's bad.
Me: The TV's sound came through speakers in the bed rather than from the TV.
Chris: That's good.
Me: The speakers in my bed didn't work.
Chris: Crap.
Fortunately, the food was good(!) and nearly all the hospital employees were nice. The air conditioner was a north pole/equatorial jungle proposition. My attending physician spoke to me at length about how I was feeling and what tests she wanted to run. She said that the X-ray and the blood tests showed no abnormalities, and that the EKG had recorded my PVCs. Throughout the day, every three hours, people came up from the hospital's lab to extract blood from my arm. Some time in the mid-morning, they wheeled me to another floor where a woman performed a sonogram on my legs to look for blood clots. She found none.
My wife showed up around lunch time with her parents, two of her grandparents, and her brother. We passed the time amicably for about an hour, then the family went home, leaving Mrs. Happy with me. Our time together was as delightful as it could be under the circumstances. We sat in the bed together doing crossword puzzles. We strolled around the hospital floor and made some phone calls to update family and friends. We talked and laughed and kissed when no one was looking. Perfectly lovely.
