A Night At The Hospital
The Background:
Probably about 8 months ago, I had what I thought was food poisoning. Terrible sense of fullness up near my solar plexus, indigestion, not being able to burp enough up to make the pressure go away, diarrhea, and finally vomiting, which mercifully ended it in the early morning hours.
6 months or so after that pleasant experience, it happened again in the same exact way. That struck me as vaguely unusual.
About a month later, I had similar symptoms but at a much lower level, more discomfort than OMIGOSHIMDYING. I did some research, because I really don’t know all that much about being sick, and came up with heartburn. After 4-5 days of this, it got rather bad, with the severity of the two previous incidents. I hoped that the vomiting would come soon and put me out of my misery. This wasn’t so late in the evening and I thought I might even get a decent night’s sleep out of it instead of waking up in the middle of the night wanting to die. Well, dry heaving was about the closest I came to that. That’s when I really started to hurt, and I had to make the decision.
The Hospital
Man, I hate hospitals. They’ve always bugged me in some unexplainable fashion. Well, at this point I was scared enough to need to go to one. I woke up Guli, and we found a hospital to go to. It was about midnight. Things loved at hospitals: paperwork, endless repetition of the same questions by different people who don’t appear to have talked to the other people, and IVs.
I had a fun IV experience. The nurse was having trouble hitting vein, and told me if if was not in the vein, it’d hurt. Well, it didn’t hurt any more than the ordinary “I got stuck with a needle” so we assumed it was in the vein. It was not. I ended up with a fat arm with a liter of saline solution sloshing around inside it. It didn’t hurt, but it sure felt oddly.
After several iterations of the Q&A sessions, I ended up getting CT scanned and sent over to a regular room from the emergency room. They gave me drugs and kept me for observation, saying a doctor would come to have a look in the morning. Being under observation means that you get to have an IV (luckily, this crew was much better at it) and roughly hourly blood pressure, pulse, and temperature checks.
The doctor finally sees me, says it sounds like an ulcer, but they need to stick a tube down me to be sure. Oh goody, this sounds like a lot of fun. They wheel me around in a wheelchair, never mind I could walk just fine, to the prep room. They give me some drugs that will make me drowsy and not remember anything afterwards. We go in for the procedure and we talk a bit waiting for the drugs to kick in, and they explain the equipment and suchlike. They tell me I am drowsy, and I suppose after being up all night they nailed that one. They start sticking the tube down my guts. This was not in any fashion pleasant, though thankfully it wasn’t a constant gagging situation. Every so often there were some bad ones though. They finally got all their pictures, hmmed and hawed, and unviolated my throat and esophagus, reassuring me that I was drowsy and wouldn’t remember this.
Then they sat me in a recovery room for about a half hour. This would have seemed like a good time for a nap, being as how I was drowsy and all, but the machine that automatically took my pulse and blood pressure kicked in about every 5 minutes, so drowsy was about the best I could manage. I had another conversation with the nurse about when I could go back, and I was told again that I’d forget all this. They must thought they were doing some kind of Jedi mind trick, and apparently I am no week minded fool.
Eventually they let me go back to the room, sit for a while, and then showed me the pictures of my guts, here’s an ulcer, take these pills once a day, call me in two weeks, thank you very much.
As this background is significantly more wordy than I expected, I will leave off here and get back with the main story later.
November 15th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Bummer dude. I hope it gets better. I think I might have one of those, but of course I’m not allowed to check or they might not let me do the fun part of my job anymore.
Fortunately for me, rolaids and pepto/maalox seem to still work.
Wondering about the rest of the main story…
Is there any way to embed messages or do any of the other usual web bbs forum stuff? Or is this a “real” blog where that’s not allowed?
November 15th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
There is a register link at the bottom right of the front page, though it doesn’t appear on THIS page because it’s an individual post and the sidebar doesn’t appear. I’ll see if I can slot that into another spot where it’s more visible in the comments section. Once your email addy has had an approved comment you can put in others with no delay without registering. I think smilies
work in here, and I’ll check if there is a plugin to allow nifty smiley and image insertion stuff in normal comments.
You can register and I can allow people to make posts (more than commenting on posts) but I’d want some way to sandbox them a bit. Not sure what features exist for that though I’d be happy enough to look into it.
There’s also the bbpress forum equivalent that’s integrated fairly well into WordPress but it’s rather weak, feature-wise. I’m still working on “the final plan”.