911 almost killed me

Sunday afternoon I came down with strep throat.

By Monday, my fever was flying up over 105.5. Highest one I got was 105.9.

I go into the doctor on Monday, and they say come in immediately. They give me penicillin.

That’s all fine. By Tuesday evening, I’m starting to feel better. The fever is gone, and the throat doesn’t hurt as bad as it was.

But I had been sweating like I was doing aerobics. For three days. It just would not stop. I was trying to drink water but I couldn’t keep up.

I got very dehydrated, and started having chest pains Tuesday evening. I was also having trouble breathing. The pains were going into my left arm, and were starting to swirl around my rib cage, and it was not going away, and was not good.

I took my blood pressure, and it was 90/70. This is very abnormally low for me. So, I figure, ok, there must be something wrong. Well, yes, there was. I was so dehydrated, that my BP actually dropped like 30 or so points from it.

But I wasn’t thinking of that, I was thinking of the chest pains and the strange BP number, so I call 911.

They show up, give me some aspirin to chew on. They put on a little oxygen tube thing for my nose.

Then the guy asks me if I’ve taken any Viagra. I say no, so he says “OK, open your mouth.” So I do, and he sprays some nitroglycerin under my tongue.

That is a vaso dilator. It opens up your blood vessels wider. This is good if you are having a heart attack, because it generally means blood vessels are blocked. If they are blocked, you want them opened up so blood can flow again. But when you open up blood vessels, your BP goes lower. I have since found out that when you have a heart attack, your BP goes up.
But I actually was not having a heart attack, I was having a low blood pressure attack, if anything. This made it go even lower.

They make me stand up, to get into the gurney to go to the hospital. I stand up, immediately get nauseous and say that I’m going to puke. One second later, and I say, no, I’m gonna faint. So I sit back down. And try to breathe. I put my head between my legs trying to stay awake. But it is not making it better. I put my head up, and fall right over.

I could feel myself go down, and hear everyone yelling, but could not move. The way I landed I was looking at a photo of my kid as a baby on the fireplace mantle. My field of vision was rapidly narrowing down and that’s what I wanted to look at if I was going to die right then, because I thought I was literally dying.

They are doing all kinds of things to me, and I see an IV bag, and some guy trying to take my blood pressure. They move my feet up over my head and things start to come around. First thing I say is “what the fuck is in that bag?” They say it is saline. They started putting that in me to pump up my liquid volume. And I’m sweating like you would not believe again. Literally, just pouring off me.

I get stabilized, and they put me in the ambulance. The guy who sprayed the stuff in my mouth was watching intently. I think he was worried.

The ambulance guy says that while I was out, my blood pressure was 60. I ask what that means, because BP is a pair of numbers, like 140/80 or something. He said the top number was 60, and the bottom number was unreadable, or 0. So my BP was 60/0. Oh. That’s really bad. Is that like near death I ask? And the smiling attendant says, well, yes. That’s really extremely bad. That’s sort of what happens when you go into cardiopulmonary arrest, I am reading. Or trying to figure out, anyway.

Great.

I get into the hospital, and they wheel me in, and they don’t know what the hell is wrong. I start piecing all this together and figure out what happened, and tell the physician assistant “I think I’m just dehydrated.” He said, “yeah, that’s what I think, too.” I ask for some water, I get a small cup. He says he’ll order some more saline to be put into me.

It doesn’t come until after I ask for a pitcher of water and they want to know why. Then the saline comes. So, anyway, they don’t know what the deal is. They take some blood for a cardiac enzyme test. It comes back negative, that means no heart attack. But then there is this small problem of me basically dropping dead on them earlier. So they keep me overnight, to make sure I don’t have a heart attack in the next few hours.

So they wheel me into this area of the hospital called the CCU. Cardiac Care Unit. This is one level above the ICU. I am hooked up to a constant heart monitor. Fine. I spend the night completely awake, chatting with the nurse and eating a ham sandwich. I have to keep fighting to get my penicillin pill for my throat to me. And they won’t give me Tylenol, because I have been eating so many of them in the last few days, that my liver enzymes are up a bit. SO no Tylenol. No aspirin, either, because I’m in the CCU. They don’t want me to be taking that inappropriately. Or something. I don’t know. So I’m there all night with strep and they won’t do anything about it, and that’s causing a slow burn in me. They say I’m a fall hazard. That if I get out of bed, I’m likely to just fall down. Don’t get up. Piss in this bottle.

The next morning, they do some more cardiac enzyme tests. Still negative, no heart attack. I’ve had liquids, and feel much better and other than a sore throat, nothing is wrong with me at all. Breakfast comes by. In the cardiac care unit, the breakfast consisted of bacon and eggs.

The cardiologist comes in, some guy I don’t know, tells me he wants me to stay there so they can do an echo cardiogram and a stress echo cardiogram. The first one is done while you just lie on your side and they take pictures of your heart working. They other one is where they put you on a treadmill, and tell you to run as fast as you can for a couple minutes, and then lay down and hold your breath. It’s fun.

I tell the guy, hey, I’ll do what you’d like, but I am sick with a strep infection, and the only thing the treadmill test will do is see how fast I can faint. He sees the validity in this, so I’m supposed to call his office up to set up a treadmill test for next week sometime. In the meantime, he leaves me with his PA, who then proceeds to ask me questions about whether or not I have a stressful job, this that and the other. I don’t want to talk to him. I feel fine. All this crap has started to get at me, and I get hit with a migraine. So, I say, look, can you get me some Imitrex, because I have a migraine, and also, something for my throat, which feels like it is on fire. He says I can’t have Imitrex, I’m in the CCU. Fine. Get me something. Fast. Please. OK. He’ll write up something.

This is like around 9am or so. Something like that. So I’m sitting there with a throat from hell and an rapidly blooming migraine, and nothing is happening. I’m getting less patient. The nurse comes in with my penicillin about 3 hours later than when I was supposed to take it. And when she does show up, nothing for the strep throat or the headache.

I finally blow up. I don’t have a heart problem, two sets of cardiac enzyme tests show that, they won’t give me anything to stop my throat from hurting, and my head is exploding. I scream at the nurse. “My wife is going to be here in a few minutes. I can sit around all day at home and I’d at least not be in pain. If you can’t get me something for my throat and my head by the time she gets here, I’m fucking getting out of this place.” She runs off.

My wife shows up. She has brought Imitrex and Tylenol for me. I take them. I get dressed. I go out into the hallway. “Take this fucking needle out of my fucking arm, I’m getting out of here now.” “Wait, the meds are on order, they’ll be here shortly.” “Let me see my chart.” So they show me the chart, there is some stuff there. It is taking a while. They ordered me up some narcotics. Which don’t really do anything for pain, particularly migraine. But they give them to me. And suddenly, I’m not so angry anymore. Funny how that worked.

I felt so bad about yelling at the nurses, though. They were only doing what they were supposed to. I ended up buying them some chocolates from the gift shop downstairs and had it sent to their desk with an apology attached.

Anyway, I still can do the echo test. So they have me sit around and wait for someone to finally show up like at 3:30 in the afternoon. By this time I’m pacing around the tiny room I’m in. I look out the door, and the door opposite me has a sign on it that says “The family has requested that there be no visitors at this sensitive time.” Oh great. Someone is dying across the hall from me. An aide comes in. “Is the person across the hall dying?” “Yes, so is the one in the next room, too.” Apparently, nearly all the patients in this area are people who are so elderly or critically ill they can not walk or in some cases even sit up. Everyone here is near death. And then there is me, who is calling the gift shop and ordering room service for the nurses. And trash tabloids for myself. Wife says “This is NOT a hotel, you don’t have room service.” I figure why not? What else am I going to do?

So hours roll by. I get another cardiac enzyme test (also negative) and they finally come and get me for the echo test. This person rolls me into this area, and I get to see my heart on a sonogram. It was cool. So then they walk away. I had been drinking tons of water and at that time I really had to pee really bad. I got tired of laying there. So I got out of the bed, and I walked over to the person and said “Do you have a bathroom?” “Oh, you can walk?” “YES! I can walk! Know what else? I can jump up and down, too!” I jumped a couple small jumps. This startled her. She was like the third or fourth person who was startled that I could actually walk--their patients aren't usually able to walk. She points me to the bathroom, and when I come back, the person is there to take me back to my room. I said, is this my ride? “Yes, but since you can walk, you can just walk back.” “Why should I walk when I can ride? But it’s ok. Hey, how about if you get in the bed and I push you?” She didn’t think that’d work. “Look, it’d be funny, sure, you’d get fired, but hey, it’d be funny.” “It’d be funny if I got fired?” “No no no. That’s not the funny part. That would be a bad part. It’s ok, let’s go.” And I was chatting to her about things, while she probably was just gritting her teeth. She stopped off someplace to talk to someone, and I just kept going to my room. She showed up a moment or two later to make sure I was in there. I said, thanks! And off she went.

The nurses came back (I had two) and we were chatting about what I did for a living. Then this other nurse comes swooping in. You could practically hear the dramatic theme music fill the room as she came in. “Dr. XXX wants to talk to you about your tests!!!” I looked at the nurses and all our eyes opened wide, and I said “Oh my god! I’m going to die!” And they said “Oh for pete’s sake, no you’re not.”

"Oh, then he probably wants to yell at me for jumping up and down in his echo lab."

"That might be."

So this new nurse gets on the phone with the doctor, and I talk to him. He tells me my heart is in perfect condition except for one small thing and that’s not a big deal. OK. He asks if the drug he gave me for the headache helped, I said, it calmed me down, but the Imitrex got rid of the headache. "Where did you get that?" "I had it smuggled in. I wasn't going to sit here in pain for no good reason." I tell him I am going bonkers in this place, and there is no reason to keep me there any longer. He says fine, but I have to call to make sure I do the treadmill test (that I don’t need). I agree, he says he’ll write some orders to let me out.

So they do, I finally get out of there. I was feeling guilty about taking up space in there that may have been better used by someone else. Really, I spent a day in almost intensive care because of a sore throat. I got souvenirs. I got a big water jug that has the hospital name on it. And I kept my pajama bottoms they gave me that say the name, too. And a couple pairs of slipper socks. And a blanket.

I don’t know if I’m going to do the stress test. People in my family do not seem to die from heart disease. We all have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but there really is no heart disease. We all die of cancer. Except my mother. She did not have cancer. She died of diabetes complications. I have no close relatives who had heart problems. All my father’s relatives died of cancer of one kind or another, including his parents, except for one of his brothers. He was lucky, he didn’t get cancer, because he was run down by a trolley.