If you have never seen the TV show House you may not understand the irony of the situation I am about to relate. I just returned from the hospital after experiencing what felt like the filming of the next episode. My wife drove me to the emergency room last night at about 9 p.m. because the flinching caused by the pain in my upper back made her uncomfortable. Macho me would have stayed home to see if it got any worse. I deferred.
The only way I can describe what I experienced is to say it was like a knife was repeatedly thrust just below my scapula, drawing my attention away from sensation of pressure about my rib cage. Stop. I know the pressure sign re. heart attack. There was also a strange all-over quivering like the shakes from a fever, but my temp was 97.7. My heart rate was hovering around 90, which is moderately high for me. Finally, the back pain had begun two days earlier in very moderate form.
You should know, dear reader and fellow armchair diagnostician, that I have a history of localizing intense stress in my gastro intestinal system. Almost thirty years ago I raced to the emergency room late one night to learn that my heart attack symptoms were a “near ulcer.” Since that episode, I have had a dozen or more recurrences. Some fewer years ago, I experienced several losses of consciousness due allegedly to intense pain in the iliac region. I had several of these “white-out” experiences over the course of a couple years.
Returning to last night, I apparently frightened the ER staff in the same manner as my wife. They strapped me to an EKG, gave me nitro-glycerin, morphine, aspirin, Tylenol, an intravenous acid reducer and probably other things I have forgotten. I received a CAT scan and delivered numerous vials of blood to the lab for testing. Naturally I was connected to a machine which monitored my heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, blood oxygen level and which screamed a warning every time I relaxed enough to fall into my frequent resting apnea behavior.
The ER attending physician determined that I should be admitted for further tests, so he passed me to the on-call internist who peppered me with 20x100 questions. You know the list: have you ever had cancer, diabetes, stroke, heart problems, surgeries, or fallen over Niagara in a barrel. I may have failed to mention that I frequently lose consciousness and sometimes writhe with gastric pain for hours on end. But she did not ask about that. She was concerned that I rode my bicycle eight miles around Bear Lake last Saturday, four days before the onset of my mysterious presenting pain.
By 2 a.m. her best guess was something muscular-skeletal, but she insisted that I be admitted for a stress test. If I passed that and a series of blood enzyme tests, I was told I could leave the hospital. I have always been pretty good at tests, so I sailed through everything they threw at me. By noon I was thoroughly exhausted from twenty-eight hours of being mostly awake and more than tired of frequent pokes, pills and blood pressure tests, and I was eager to break my mandated fast, now approaching sixteen hours.
If you are still reading this, you must be bored; I know I was by this point in the adventure. Thank goodness they had cable in the little TV that swung on an articulated arm over my automatic pressure adjusting air mattress equipped hospital bed. They also had earphones to give the other patient in the room so his blaringly mindless wee hours TV could be muted. By 11 a.m. they had run out of things to test, so I was told I could leave as soon as the doctor read the results of my second set of “pictures” post stress test. By 2:30 I was finally wheeled to the door where my wife retraced our steps from last night.
I haven’t seen the bill for my nineteen hour stay, but if it does not reach five figures, I will be surprised. I am thankful for my wife’s hospitalization insurance in a more tangible way than I was yesterday. Ironically, all that money has not bought an answer to what caused my pain. Ironically I am still of the opinion that hospitalization insurance is a luxury item only the rich are entitled to. I also believe firmly that when the Lord calls you home, the Blue Cross is not the one you should be counting on.
As I write this I am feeling about the same level of pain as I was thirty-six hours ago. I left the hospital without telling them it had returned. If it intensifies, I will roll over and wait for it to pass if my wife will let me. Or not. There may be additional irony in this situation for those of you who think I bear a strong physical resemblance to Laurie/House and an even stronger character likeness. Or not.
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