\jeff{krimmel}

An Early Trip to the ER

Friday night Ariele and I laid pretty low. Watched a little bit of Scarface (an awesome movie, by the way), and then later in the evening I decided to play some chess online (which I wrote about here. I went to bed around 2:30 AM or so. Just before 3:30 AM, I woke up with an excruciating pain between the bottom of my sternum and my belly button that extended slightly to the right side of my body. I laid in bed for a little while hurting like crazy and then decided to go the restroom in the hope that it was just gas. I came back to bed, curled up in the fetal position (it hurt too badly to keep my upper body straight), and eventually decided to make another trip to the restoom.

I’m still in a lot of pain at this point. Within a minute or two of climbing back into bed, the pain starts to affect my breathing. It gets tougher and tougher to take normal size breaths, because the pain is too intense. So, I start panting a little bit (short, fast breaths) just to catch wind. Fortunately, Ariele was able to take me to the hospital, and I went through all the paperwork rigamarole once I got there. You know, I wonder when the time is going to come when I get one of those forms and don’t even think about trying to write “Yes, please” in the little checkboxes they give you next to “Sex”. How many times per day do you think those people get that? And yet, everytime I think about doing it, I laugh.

I got back to my little room in the hospital area and visit briefly with the doctor. He tells me they’re going to give me a concoction of a medicine to stop stomach spasms, an antacid, and a numbing agent. If that doesn’t work, then it’s likely an organ issue, and his guess after listening to my story and feeling around for himself is maybe something to do with my gall bladder. I take the concoction and lay in the bed for another half hour or so. The nurse comes in and asks how I’m feeling, and I tell her about the same as I was before. The doctor comes back and asks how I’m feeling, and I tell him marginally better. He then lets me know he’s going to have the nurse come back to draw blood and get me ready for the ultrasound so they can take a look at my stomach. Sure enough, within ten minutes of the doctor leaving the room, the pain vanishes. It went from excruciating, to “wow, this hurts”, to “this is still pretty damn uncomfortable”, to “yeah, I think it’s still hurting”, to getting up to use the restroom and realizing there’s no more pain. Normal breaths, deep breaths, standing up straight, lying down flat. No pain.

The nurse comes back with all the blood work stuff, and I tell her the good news. The doctor comes back in to check on me, and I explain to him what happened. He feels around for a few seconds, and everything seems fine to him. He diagnoses it as a case of gastritis and gives me a prescription for Pepcid. I get up, go home, and go right back to sleep (it’s just before 7:00 AM at this point). I woke up about noon on Saturday still with no pain. It’s been about 60 hours, and I still feel fine. It was a very weird deal. Oh well, that’s about par for the course regarding my routine of an ER visit a year (at least it wasn’t a knee this time).