I spent 5 ½ hours in the emergency room last night. It was a BLAST. Really. I recommend it for parties.
I started having some chest pain around 4-something, while sitting at my desk. I tried standing up, moving around, curling into a little ball in my big comfy chair…and finally started frantically dialing phone numbers. I tried my boss – not there. Tried my admin – not there. Tried security, and got put on hold. Called my husband and asked him to come get me. Luckily he had my car, so he had the security badge to enter the campus. Otherwise I would have had to get a hold of someone to register him.
I managed to make it down to the lobby, although I was quite certain I was having a heart attack. It felt like something was squeezing my chest. I honestly have not felt anything close to that degree of pain before. It came in waves of horrendous pain, and then tolerable pain…or perhaps I was able to cope for a minute or two and then couldn’t, and on and on. I can compare it to labor pain / contractions – but in my chest.
When my husband showed up I was crumpled on the floor of the entryway at work. Odd that nobody noticed me, but it saved me trying to explain anything to anyone. We went to the closest hospital – where they did an EKG, determined I was not at the immediate time having a heart attack, and sent us to the waiting room…to wait. I don’t know how long we were there. I sat there scrunched over alternating crying and swearing, and time had no real value at that point.
They eventually took me back to a room, started and IV, and gave me morphine…which did no good. They took some x-rays, blood, and vital signs, followed by giving me more drugs. I don’t know what the second one was, but it was fantastic. It actually took the pain away.
After all of the tests came back, they determined that they had no idea what was going on. Always nice to hear that. I was sent home with a handful of drugs and instructions to immediately contact my cardiologist – whom I have called, but have not heard back from. In the interim, I am in a slight bit of pain, but NOTHING compared to yesterday.
All I can think about is how terrified I was when this all started – how I though I was having a heart attack. I don’t know if I did, or if it was something else entirely. I would suspect that it was the vaso-spasm thing that affects my heart acting up, but then I have never had pain associated with it before. I know it wasn’t heartburn, as I had not eaten anything at all yesterday. Save me the eating lecture – I am not interested in hearing it…I was too busy to eat. As for stress, it wasn’t a stressful day, just busy. So I have to think it was the heart.
Hopefully I will get to see the heart doc and find out the story. This sort of stuff creeps me out.