4:30 Saturday (yesterday) morning – awoke feeling nauseous and with a clutching pain in my chest. Drink water, walk around about, hope it goes away, go back to bed.
Awake a few more times with similar sensation over next few hours.
9:30 – noon Go to MDA w/Chris for his blood draws. Lab is behind so we wait forever. Around noon they tell us his platelets have dropped from 19 on Thursday to 4. He will need platelet transfusions that afternoon at 3 along with his daily infusion of anti-fungal and antibiotic IV meds.
noon – 2:45ish
Return to hotel, eat yummy leftover pad thai. Chris rests in bed. I start to realized that perhaps ignoring the chest pains, which haven’t gone away but continue in infrequent bursts with less levels of pain, would be quite stupid.
Call the emergency room people for the hospital (St. Luke’s) next to MDA and ask what happens if I don’t have insurance. I’ve never been to a hospital and not had insurance. They tell me I need to come in. Get a bit emotional since we only need ONE patient between us, not two.
Text Lori and tell her what’s going on, she offers to keep me company in the ER. At first I was going to decline then realize that it would be really nice not to go by myself.
2:45 – Drive to MDA, park in parking garage, drop Chris off on the floor he needs to go to. Ask him a million times if he’ll be ok. He has never gone to an appointment without me since his diagnosis.
Walk across MDA’s huge bottom floor, exit and walk across the street into the ER room of St. Luke’s.
3:00 – 6:00: I fill out paperwork, get a little bracelet with my info on it. They take my vitals. I’m used to all of this, but watching Chris do it on an almost daily basis. When asked for my birthdate I have to stop myself from saying Chris’ instead of mine. They do an EKG. They admit me to the ER and I get blood taken and a chest xray. The tech who inserts my arm IV is in training.
ER Dr. asks me lots of questions (I’m not on any medication nor do I have any family history of sudden heart problems). Lori arrives and keeps me company – it made the time pass by much quicker. I’m hooked up to a heart monitor and one of those finger things that monitors your pulse as well. The machine beeps off and on at me.
Dr. tells me everything comes back clear and she isn’t worried about a heart attack for me, it would be more likely that I have a clot in my lungs. But the pain doesn’t increase with deep breathing or when I exercise. Pain may be due to stress. I have a slightly irregular heartbeat, called premature ventricular complexes or PVC. It’s not a dangerous condition.
I am told to follow up with my primary care physician in 3-5 days. I’ll be looking for one of those in Houston that sees patients sans insurance. I’m told that if the pain increases or if I have problems breathing to return to the ER immediately. I’m supposed to avoid alcohol and caffeine. I’m supposed to rest for the next few days and the pain should subside.
I’m texting with Chris off and on the whole time. The Trans unit is behind so he waits nearly an hour to get a bed. Then his nurse says that its not in his orders to get platelets so that has to be figured out.
I hug Lori goodbye outside St. Luke’s and walk back across the street to MDA. The radiologist who did my chest xray said it’s not uncommon that they see caregivers in the ER there. The Dr. said the chest pain may be stress related but since I have no history of that she’s not going to diagnosis it as such.
I get to Chris’ room and he finishes his IV meds and platelets around 8 p.m. Go back to the hotel and a friend of Chris’ brings dinner over to us. We make plans to see Tron in 3-D at the Imax this evening. Chris has been wanting to see it since it came out.
I’ve realized that it probably is stress related. I let two people who sent me stupid messages on facebook annoy me and piss me off. One person is an old friend of Chris’ that is choosing, for whatever reason, to be dramatic about something that doesn’t really even have anything to do with her and jump to all sorts of conclusions. It’s really really fucking annoying that people act like this but I need to not get worked up by it. If this is a stress related condition then I need to figure out how to not let people piss me off when they act stupid, because people are stupid and that is not going to change.
ad astra per aspera 