* * *
Also, reader Kathy would like to know how much y’all are paying for gas. If you’d be so kind, leave a comment telling us how much your gas is, per gallon, and what part of the country you’re in. For the record, I think I paid $1.89 a gallon when I got gas earlier this week – I opted for the cheap stuff this time around.
* * *
(Note for the spazzes amongst you: clearly I’m fine, or I wouldn’t be writing an entry about it, right? Right. So turn your spaz-o-meter to zero before reading the rest of this entry. Thankyew. Mwah!)
Fred and I had a hot night on the town last night. Whoo! That’s right, we spent two and a half hours in the emergency room because I was having a weird fluttery feeling in the center of my chest and when I Googled “Symptoms of heart attack woman”, the top symptom was always “Odd feeling in center of chest”. I was pretty sure I wasn’t having a heart attack – come on, I’m healthy as a horse – but when I went to watch TV with Fred it seemed to be a stronger feeling and I tried laying down to see if it would go away, and it didn’t, so I waited until Fred was done with his snack, for I am a wonderful, kind, THOUGHTFUL wife who is underappreciated, and then I sat up and fixed him with a look and said “Will you take me to the emergency room?”
Talk about a sentence to get a man’s heart racing! I thought he was going to have a heart attack right there in front of me. I went upstairs to change my shirt (because I knew they’d be taking my blood pressure, and I needed to be wearing a short-sleeved shirt) and told the spud that Fred was taking me to the doctor and we’d be gone a while, and that Fred would have his cell phone with him.
Then we drove to the emergency room in record time, and Fred kept saying “Keep talking so I know you haven’t keeled over dead!” and I kept telling him to shaddup, I wasn’t going to keel over dead.
And then I keeled over dead.
Kidding! Just kidding. Did I scare you there for a minute? Did you think I was writing this from The Great Beyond?
Anyway, we got to the hospital and went to the ER and signed in and started on the paperwork I had to fill out, and we’d only been in there about three minutes (juuuuust long enough to catch the very end of
Survivor and find out who got voted off, even though we did our very best not to listen. Urgh!) when they called me into triage to ask me questions and take my blood pressure and all that good stuff. I tried to explain the feeling in my chest and where it was and explain that it wasn’t PAIN, it was just uncomfortable and it was a fluttering, bubbly kind of sensation. Fred jumped in and helpfully TATTLED on me. “It’s been going on for TWO DAYS NOW,” he said disapprovingly and gave me A Look. “It’s been going on since YESTERDAY AFTERNOON!” I corrected hostilely. “And it wasn’t constant at first, but now it is!” Fred added, and I gave him a Just You Shut Up look.
The paramedic took my pulse and told me reassuringly that it seemed to be nice and strong, and then she led us back into the examining part of the ER, showed us to a tiny room, and left us there.
The door was open and so we could hear her telling the doctor “She says it’s not painful, it’s a fluttering feeling.” “Fluttering?” the doctor said. “Yes, in the middle of her chest.”
For the rest of the evening, Fred snickered whenever anyone said “fluttering”, because the word just seemed to baffle everyone who said it. I CAN’T HELP IT! THAT’S WHAT IT FELT LIKE, MOTHERFUCKERS!
A few minutes later a doctor walked in.
“Having chest pains, huh?” he said.
“Not pains!” I corrected him. “It’s more of a… fluttering kind of feeling.”
Fred snickered.
The doctor gazed at me confusedly, and then gave me a pointed look. “And what other health issues do you have?”
(“Oh, ‘CAUSE I’M FAT, you mean?” I didn’t say.)
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m on thyroid medication.”
“Nothing else?” he asked, glancing unsubtly at my stomach.
“No.”
He gave me a johnny and told me to undress from the waist up and put the gown on and another doctor would be in shortly. I did so, and Fred and I sat and waited and cracked jokes. A few minutes later, another doctor came in and introduced himself as Dr. Anders0n. He said “Chest pains, huh?”
“Not pain,” I said.
“What does it feel like?” he asked.
“It’s kind of a fluttering feeling, right here,” I said.
Fred snickered.
“And is it happening right now?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m feeling it right now.”
He listened to my lungs and heart and asked a few more questions.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not sure what it is. You’re feeling it right now, but your heart sounds okay to me, a nice strong beat. It could be something, or it could be nothing. I’m going to order an EKG and some blood tests and maybe that will tell us something. Now,” he said with a pointed look at my gut. “What other health issues do you have?”
“I’m taking Synthroid for my thyroid,” I said (and honestly – why do three people have to ask the same questions? And all three of them write down the answers? Why, god?). He jotted down a note.
“Anything else?” A glance at my stomach again.
“That’s it.”
And then he launched into this really long explanation of what it might or might not be, and right around the time he said “ventricle” for the third time I found myself on the very verge of laughing out loud, because I desperately wanted to make that “Whoosh!” sound and make the motion, you know the one, where you fly your hand directly over the top of your head to indicate that what the other person is saying to you is going right over your head.
Fred told me later that he was watching me and saw my face go blank at that very moment. I was struggling with all my might not to laugh out loud, because I didn’t want to have to explain WHY I was laughing.
Anyway, the doctor finished talking and said someone would be in shortly to do the EKG and take my blood, and Fred and I sat and laughed and made fun of ourselves and the doctors.
Some time later a nurse came in with the EKG machine and Fred went across the hall to use the bathroom. The nurse pulled up the front of the gown I was still wearing, doing her best to keep me mostly covered.
“I’m going to do my best to keep you covered,” she said. “They knock before they come in, but they knock as they’re opening the door, before you can tell them to wait!”
Then she showed me the stickers and told me there were twelve of them, and that she’d put the stickers on me, and then attach a… uh… THINGY to each sticker and it shouldn’t take but a few minutes. She put one on each of my legs (which is when I wished that I’d shaved my legs in the shower that morning), one on each of my wrists, and then she hoisted my left breast out of the way and put the rest of the stickers under there.
Fred walked through the door as she hoisted, doing his best to open the door as little as possible so he could slip through. He sat with his back to me as she did the test. It took only a couple of minutes once everything was in place, and then she printed out the test and made a copy, and pulled the stickers back off. And let me tell you – those stickers were REALLY sticky and didn’t want to come off. She told me that the EKG results looked fine to her, but that the doctor would discuss them with me.
A little while later, a lab tech came in to take my blood, and he set his little carrying case down and started pulling empty tubes out. A LOT of empty tubes. Five, to be exact. He started poking around in the crook of my right elbow, located a vein, and was done so fast I hardly knew I’d had it done.
“I was waiting for you to tell him that they usually use a butterfly needle in the back of your right hand!” Fred scolded me after the guy was gone. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because they just used that vein to take blood at the doctor’s office on Wednesday!” I said. “And the phlebotomists here at the hospital usually do a good job of getting blood from my arm. GOD! YOU’RE SO BOSSY!”
And then we cooled our heels for more than an hour, waiting for the doctor to come back in and talk to us. Fred finally opened the door so we could see what was going on. A whole lot of nothin’, is what was going on. The doctors and nurses stood around chatting and we sat and watched them. The nurse who’d done my EKG walked by.
“Oh, he’ll be in in a minute,” she said. “We just got your lab results back.”
And for the next fifteen minutes or so, we watched the doctor yukking it up with various other people who wandered by.
“Give him a dirty look,” Fred suggested.
“I will not!”
“I should go out there and fake a seizure,” he said.
“Go for it!”
“You should clutch your chest and gasp ‘Oh, my heart!’ and fall over,” he suggested.
“Yeah, I should. Heh.”
And then I got the idea that Fred should go out there and kick him in the ass, and the mental image made me laugh really hard. I’m not talking a straight-on kick in the ass, but one of those kicks where you kick someone in the ass with the side of your foot. I imagined Fred running up behind the doctor and doing that, and then his reaction. And it amused me so much that whenever anyone walked by our door, I tried to get Fred to go kick them in the ass.
He wouldn’t, though. Spoilsport.
Finally, the doctor came in and said that the test results came back just fine. He gave me a copy of the lab results, told me to follow up with my regular doctor, and then said the nurse would be in in a minute with my discharge papers.
Three hours after we arrived at the emergency room, we were on our way home.
“Don’t go dying in your sleep,” Fred said as he kissed me goodnight. “That would really piss me off!”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, and went straight to bed.
This morning my chest was still doing its thing, so I called and made an appointment with my doctor. She listened to my heart, asked a bunch of questions, looked over some lab results, and posited that perhaps the problem was that once again I appear to be on the edge of diabetic – not quite there, but almost. Also, my thyroid levels are a little low, so maybe the combination is causing occasional palpitations. She ordered an ECG and a Holter monitor (basically a 24-hour EKG), both of which I will be getting next Thursday.
What do you want to bet I stop having that funny feeling in my chest before then?
* * *
If you’ve ever had an ECG, answer me this – can I wear a bra to the appointment? Because the page the nurse at my doctor’s office gave me said to wear a button-up shirt, but didn’t say whether a bra is okay.
* * *
And let me just say really quickly that I really really really love my doctor. I was so very very sad when my previous primary care physician left to go to an office closer to where she was from, sure that I’d never have another doctor as wonderful as she was, but Dr. M is even better. Love her!
* * *
Just a wee bit freaked by the camera.
* * *]]>