hospitals make me sick

Sit up straight and chew your food ~or~ How a simple dinner turned into my 2021 emergency room visit

Last night I was eating dinner:

  • Jasmine rice
  • Brie chicken (baked)
  • Veggies (carrots, peas, brocolli)

This is entirely unremarkable.

I was eating on our old couch, which is terrible and tends to turn your body into a spaghetti noodle when you sit on it. Your body just naturally tends to slouch. I sit up as straight as I can when eating, but slouching can occur.

Last night I ate and slouched simultaneously, and the consequences of doing this were rendered quickly and severely.

I began to feel a pain in my chest that said, “The food is not going down the way it should per digestion/gravity/etc.” I got up, went to the bathroom and attempted to clear my throat. This has happened a few times before and usually in about ten minutes or less, the food is sufficiently dislodged to allow me to resume eating.

Not this time.

I spent an hour with that increasingly searing chest pain, constantly trying to swallow and failing, having my gag reflex kick in, with resultant attendance to the sink to allow for any food that decided to journey through my system in reverse. It was exhausting. A few sips of water seemed to go down, but when I tried more, it did not and the pain intensified. The water eventually made its way back out.

I decided it was time to get a second opinion or replacement organs at the hospital conveniently next door.

We arrived between 7:30 and 8 p.m. I left just after midnight. It wasn’t even my longest ER visit. But it felt very long.

After checking in, I was issued a K95 mask to replace my own, then moved to a waiting area that is really just the entrance to the emergency room. The hospital has utterly run out of space, which is why I’m not objecting to the construction now happening across the lane from us, as the new hospital building looks like it’s five times bigger.

There was a woman with a baby sitting across from me and the baby was a bit fussy. I tried to not let it stress me out, because relaxing seemed very important in not making the pain worse. Jeff gave me a couple of small white towels. I excused myself, stepped outside and basically barfed into one, though at this point nothing was coming up but liquid. I threw the towel away and returned. I told Jeff to go home. He did.

I later went to the washroom and gagged over the sink. Initially I felt better. I later went back and accidentally swallowed some of my saliva, causing me to choke and cough on it. This went as well as you might expect. The pain at this point seemed unbearable. I tried to think of other things to distract me, like kittens or skateboards.

Eventually I and several others were moved to the next waiting area, to a row of seats with Plexiglas partitions between them. This was also not a real waiting area, it was a hallway, so people and people with equipment were regularly walking past me. Then they parked an XPS right in front of me, which remained there until I got moved to an exam room. An XPS is an eXpandable Patient Surface, not a sleek Dell laptop:

Not pictured: Two women sleeping in beds to the left, also in the hallway

I didn’t realize until later that the two guys with him were not paramedics, but corrections officers. I couldn’t ascertain why he was in, but when a doctor came by and talked to him, I heard something about seizures. I hoped he would not have a seizure in front of me. He did not. When the doctor left, he curled back up to sleep again.

The guy sitting to my right did not have anything obviously wrong with him (spike stuck in head, missing fingers gushing blood, etc.) but as we waited and waited he seemed to become more anxious. He would pull his mask down, take a long breath, exhale slowly, then put the mask back on. He repeated this several times. I almost asked Anxious guy if he was OK. By this point the lodged food had finally started moving down my throat as nature intended, so I was feeling better and my instinct to help kicked in. I ultimately refrained, and he got called in before I did.

I eventually also got called and was taken to an exam room around 10 p.m. By 10:23 I was thinking it would be spiffy if someone came in to see me by 10:30.

Ho ho. How naive I was!

As I slouched on the exam bed, I caught a glimpse of Anxious Guy walking down the hall, this time with his cap removed. His hair looked different than I expected. You can make your hair very mysterious by wearing a cap. I got the impression he might have been giving a urine sample. Conveniently, I could see a collection of such samples across the hall from the exam room, sitting on a counter. One of them looked almost orange. Ew. I reminded myself that I did not have to look at everything while in a hospital.

As time continued to tick by, I began fighting the urge to sleep. With the pain now gone, I was very tired. I thought about finding a nurse and saying I was splitting, that I was totes OK now. I set a deadline of midnight. If a doctor didn’t appear before then, I was getting the heck out of there.

The doctor arrived a few minutes before midnight, so my trick worked! She was very nice and immediately apologized for being so late. After some prodding and poking, she determined that:

  • The condition was not cardiac-related
  • Was unlikely due to aspirating (food going down the windpipe)
  • Was likely food lodging in the esophagus
  • Did not require urgent treatment

She recommended I follow up with my doctor and perhaps arrange to have a camera shoved down my throat to see what’s going on in there. I do tend to be a bit phlegmy, which no doubt makes these things worse.

I also promised to sit up straight when eating. She frowned on watching TV while eating. I’m like, “But we don’t even have a table to eat at in the dining room! Also, we have no dining room.” But I didn’t say this to her.

To allay my anxiousness over ever putting food into my mouth again, she suggested I eat a couple of small cookies and drink some juice before leaving, to see if anything horrible might happen. I did so without any notable issue, other than my throat feeling raw from the evening’s shenanigans. I managed to find my way to the exit and walked home under mostly clear skies. I got in at 12:09 a.m., with six minutes already on my exercise ring,. Woo!

Since i’d only had half my dinner before Throat Catastrophe 2021 hit, I decided to eat, but wanted something that would be very difficult to get lodged in my throat. I had a small bowl of ice cream. It did not get lodged.

This morning I felt some trepidation eating breakfast, but it was fine. I’m not sure how I’ll handle meals at the couch. Do they make sit/stand tables for dining?

Anyway, let this be a lesson to all those who would oppose mom’s advice to sit up straight and chew your food. Mom is right!

And no more ER visits for 2021. Or preferably ever, please.

My life as a plank of wood -or- Another trip to the emergency room, November 2019 edition

This past Monday was Remembrance Day. While others were out paying respects to those who fought in all those great wars, I was at home, sitting on the bed, getting ready for a run. When I hopped off the bed, I felt a strange and unpleasant twinge in my lower back. I had spontaneously pulled a muscle. I’m pretty sure this is the same one I’ve spontaneously pulled before. I’m also pretty sure I know why this happens, but more on that in a bit.

The pain was immediate and my mobility curtailed just as swiftly. No bending, no stooping, no anything without being reminded that my back was no longer operating normally. I decided to take a Robax and suffer quietly. I went to work the next day. My suffering became less quiet. I took the following day off to actually give the back time to recover.

Fast-forward to Friday afternoon. The lower back is still a bit sore, which is annoying, but tolerable, and it’s not stopping me from doing things other than lifting heavy items, which I generally don’t want to do, anyway. I am planning to do a run on Sunday.

Before dinner I prop myself on the bed and color some of my sketches on the iPad. This is very soothing and relaxing. As I am doing this, the back muscle starts talking. At first it’s a murmur, but it becomes more insistent. I finally get up and now instead of feeling a little sore, it feels more like a pinched nerve, radiating waves of constant pain. This, I think, is not a good start to the weekend.

Apparently laying on the bed was a very bad idea. Who knew beds were so bad for you? (Our bed is kind of terrible, really. You almost need to leap to get onto it, for one thing.) I muddle through dinner. I take some Advil. I later take a T3. When I finally fall asleep I dream that I am flying, which is not entirely inaccurate based on my current medicated state.

By morning the pain has not diminished, and while I don’t think it’s an actual pinched nerve, there is no doubt it is hurting a lot more than before. I have breakfast and go to the nearby walk-in clinic. They tell me they can see me at 3 p.m., which is four hours hence. I imagine even the worse case scenario at the Emergency room won’t take that long, so I cross the street to Royal Columbian.

The triage area is curiously quiet. There are no injured people there spouting blood or holding out mangled hands. No one is barfing. An old man seems confused and I show him where to stand to be called forward. I am next after him. I answer all the questions, they take my blood pressure, temperature and tag me. When asked for allergies, I say, “Penicillin, sulfa and another antibiotic I can’t remember, but would recognize the name if I saw it.” The nurse consults my file to check. It describes my allergies thusly: “Penicillin. And more.” We give each other a look.

A young guy paces past saying to someone/no one that he is positive he is having a heart attack. He looks surprisingly hale for someone having a heart attack. I think I see a band on his wrist, so he’s already checked in, or has already been seen and is back, possibly due to the alleged heart attack. He wanders out again.

I am told to go to the Zone 2 waiting area. This is new to me, but it’s just another waiting area around the corner. There is a door to Zone 2 that requires a keycard and a sign that says a nurse will let you in shortly. I wait.

There are a few other people here, but I am again struck at how quiet it is for a weekend. The entrance where I came in is in view over to my right. I look out on the soggy gray day and the heart attack guy wanders in again, talking about the heart attack he is having. An intern and two security officers arrive and they all go through the sliding doors outside to discuss the heart attack. The heart attack guy leaves at the end of the discussion. Or maybe he goes around the hospital and sneaks back in through a different entrance.

A nurse takes me into Zone 2. I wonder how many zones there are. I again sit and wait, but this time there are no others in the chairs beside me. Conveniently there is a sign that tells me exactly where in the process I am and what steps lie ahead. Across the hall from me is an exam room with a number of beds and the curtains that provide a modicum of privacy. Another nurse waves me in to the leftmost bed, and tells me to take off my clothes, emphasizing that I do not need to remove my underwear. I can only imagine the stories. I put my clothes in a provided bag, put on the always-stylish hospital gown, have it sexily slide off one shoulder, gingerly try to make it fit better (remember, nearly every movement at this point is causing pain), then finally sit on the edge of the bed and wait for the doctor.

On the other side of the curtain is the old man I was directing earlier. He talks about burping a lot. I can’t quite tell what his issue is, but it seems related to not pooping because the doctor is telling him to make sure to drink lots of water and put some bran and green vegetables in his diet so he can go regularly. He mentions Metamucil as a last resort. He asks the old guy if he is feeling better now, and the old guy says yes. I am perhaps relieved (ho ho) to not get the exact details on why he feels better now. They then seem to repeat most of the conversation for reasons unknown.

The doctor comes in, asks me a bunch of questions, including if I have difficulty peeing or pooping. I say no to the former and that I hadn’t done the latter. I think he thought I hadn’t done the latter since Monday, which would be alarming. I assured him that I was “irregularly regular” (whatever that means) and that seemed good enough for him. He then did some pulling and prodding on my hands, arms, feet and legs. The left leg pull nearly caused a technicolor explosion to go off in my brain, as apparently the afflicted muscle directly connects to whatever muscles were being stretched in the left leg.

He said I had muscle spasms and gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, and a pain reliever. He told me if I moved a lot, it would hurt more. Very logical. He told me to avoid laying down, as the muscle would stiffen. Also logical. I thanked him, got dressed and bumbled around for five minutes, walking into various rooms before finding my way back to the entrance. Some of these rooms were very close to people-holding-out-mangled-hands but I averted my eyes to avoid mental trauma to go with my physical trauma.

I headed to Save On Foods to get the prescription, and cookies.

While waiting at the pharmacy counter, a guy came up to me and asked a question.

It was the heart attack guy. He pointed to a shelf and asked which aspirin was the correct type to take if you were having a heart attack, because he was having a heart attack. He was actually pointing at the correct aspirin, so I confirmed this, he said thanks, gave me a fist bump and presumably paid for the aspirin and will go on to live a fruitful life.

I got my drugs and cookies and went home.

At home I discovered the pain killer is an opioid and it comes with a full sheet of dire warnings and precautions that basically amount to “BE CAREFUL WITH THIS KILLER MEDICINE, PAL.” The sheet mentions horrible side effects, addiction and uses the word “death” multiple times. I took one of these deadly opioid pills and my brain mushroomed through my skull and I saw the universe as I never have before.

Actually, nothing happened. It took awhile to kick in and now that it has, the pain is muted a bit, though that could also be the much less scary anti-inflammatory. I vow not to operate any heavy equipment, though, out of respect for all the dire warnings. We’ve hidden the keys to the bulldozer.

As I type this, I feel better than I did this morning and am cautiously hopeful that tomorrow will not be too bad, though there is no way in heck I will be running. I might look at treadmills, though. I’ve also promised to revive this year’s resolution to start stretching. I will be setting a stretch goal, if you will, because as the title suggests, I am as flexible as a plank of wood, and these sorts of muscle pulls/spasms are likely due to how inflexible I am. I need to stretch out. Literally. And I will.

Soon™.

In the meantime, I am quietly grateful that this emergency room visit was so surprisingly not bad. And I hope heart attack guy is okay.

That 5+ hour trip to the Emergency room last night

Last night around 6:30 I went to the Emergency room at Royal Columbian. I left shortly before midnight. This might sound like the beginning of a horror story, but it’s actually rather mundane.

I have a cold right now. It started with a tickle in my throat Monday afternoon and evolved into full sore throat/stuffed and/or runny sinuses and coughing since then.

The cold is not why I went to the Emergency room, it was jut an added bonus.

Yesterday morning I awoke to a soreness in my mid-back that felt like I’d been kicked by a horse. Not an accidental kick, either, one where the horse was feeling aggrieved and seeking revenge. I took some Tylenol (and DayQuill for the cold), but by late afternoon it was persisting. I should go to the clinic, I thought. But I delayed, had supper and finally decided I couldn’t ignore it, and by then all of the walk-in clinics were closed, so I had to go to Emergency.

It’s convenient. That’s where the happy part of this ends.

Upon seeing that the check-in area was full, I knew I was not exactly going to be in and out.

Just over half an hour after checking in, I was called to the second station, where I answered a few questions and had my temperature and blood pressure taken. I was not told the results, so I figured they were normal or normal-ish. I sat back down.

The two people I remember most clearly were a man likely in his 50s (not me) with a scruffy beard and one of those always-shouting kind of voices, so whenever he said anything, everyone within a hundred meters could hear. This is how I found out he had some kind of steel in his eye and he wanted to get it out. He chatted with several other people and would sometimes wander off for awhile, then come back and chat some more, his jokes and commentary ringing out like machine gun fire.

He seemed defeated, though, by the barfing girl. An older couple brought in a young girl, perhaps three years old. Cute kid. I looked over and whatever she had eaten earlier began burbling out of her mouth. Then it sluiced out. Then I stopped looking over that way. They got a cute little blue barf pouch for her, but I think it was probably too late. They left for awhile, presumably to clean her up. I didn’t find out why she was throwing up because they spoke in normal tones. The girl herself seemed very chill about the whole thing. I’ve never seen anyone so casually vomit.

Another half hour passed–it was now about 7:41 p.m.–when a nurse came along and took me aside to get a blood sample. This was new, but since I’m fine with blood being taken if I don’t fast for 16 hours first, no big deal. She did a remarkably good job of getting the needle in. Today you can barely see the mark. I was sent back to the check-in area with a taped-down piece of gauze on my right arm.About 40 minutes later I am finally moved to triage, which is as full as check-in. I find a seat near the end and fiddle around on the phone, watching the battery slowly diminish. Most of the people here have no immediately identifiable cause for being here, which is a relief. The girl sitting to my right asks if it’s cold or if she’s dying. That’s not exactly what she said, but she spoke very softly. I told her it sure wasn’t warm, which was true. She talked a bit about why she was there. Something about her eye. I nodded and smiled, hopefully in the right places.

At 9:34 p.m.–almost an hour later– I am finally taken to an exam room, where I am told to take off my shirt and put on a gown. This is later revealed to serve no purpose. The nurse asks some questions, takes my temperature and blood pressure again, but this time she notes that my blood pressure is a little high. I have mystery pain in my back, am suffering from a bad cold and have already been here for three hours, so yes, my blood pressure is a little high. She shrugs it off and leaves.

Nearly an hour later, the doctor arrives and after a few questions, gives me a bottle to pee in. As it turns out, I really had to go, so this is convenient.

I have to wait for someone who seems to take a very long time in the one available washroom. I don’t want to know why he is taking so long. I go in, provide a generous sample, put it on a napkin on the sample table, then return to triage. It is now 10:46 p.m.

About 45 minutes later the doctor comes by to tell me the blood test looks fine, and there is no sign of infection in the urine. All good! But there is a tiny bit of blood in the urine (the amount is too small to be visible). He says this could be due to being older (he is a young doctor and at least he says “older” and not “old”) or a sign of a kidney stone. I am told to wait (ho ho) for someone to give me a form for an ultrasound, after which I will consult with my doctor over the results.

I get the form and leave. It is 11:37 p.m. I get home a few minutes before midnight and eat a Clif Bar because I’m hungry and in a bad mood.

Today I schedule an ultrasound for 3:15 p.m. tomorrow. I am told to drink three cups of water an hour before and to not pee them out until after the ultrasound. The test is conveniently at Royal Columbian. Less conveniently I will be at work, so I will have to leave early.

What’s funny in retrospect is how I didn’t flip out or go squirrelly with how long it took. I think I just knew going in and accepted it. Also, there was only one crying baby, briefly, in the background.

But the next time I feel compelled to get a health issue checked out ASAP, I am not waiting until the walk-in clinics have closed. That, or I’m taking a laptop next time and writing half a novel while I wait.

The wonder of modern drugs

Yesterday my ex-tooth was causing me no end of misery in the form of a constant sharp pain in my upper jaw. It was the kind of thing where if you thought about it, if you concentrated on it, you could make it worse, get it to really start throbbing. Doing the opposite, focusing on getting into a Zen-like state of calm, would minimize it, but at best it would become a constant background thing, kind of like someone mowing the lawn outside your window, except they inexplicably do it for the entire day without taking breaks.

I was given two things to help with the ex-tooth. Tylenol 3 for the pain–remember, Tylenol 3 is not like the over-the-counter version. It’s a narcotic and enough of it can make you quite silly. The other was the antibiotic to combat the infection. I was given a T3 and an Alleve tablet before leaving the hospital, then took the antibiotics about half an hour later, after getting the prescription made.

Within half an hour of that, the pain was gone. Not just blunted, but essentially gone. The area around the ex-tooth is tender and sore, but the actual pain is gone. Today I’ve been continuing to take the antibiotics, but no T3s, and the pain is still gone.

It’s actually a little unnerving how effective the drugs have been. It makes me wonder how often they are used to similar effect for more nefarious purposes. Mostly I’m just glad we have medicine that can do this kind of stuff, because trying to distract myself from pain is something I can only manage about 50% of the time. I’m like a half-monk. One moment I’m in deep contemplation, the next I’m distracted by my own weird train of thought, like “Don’t think about the pain, you’ll only make it worse. Oh, I’m thinking about it right now, aren’t I? Yes, I told you not to do that. Right, I’ll stop. Okay, I’m thinking about kittens now, not the pain. You know, that constant ticking pain in my jaw. I mean kittens. Adorable kittens. I am not thinking about the pain I just described. I am full of lies.”

Anyway, Tylenol 3 and antibiotics are my new best friends this week.

Next week, back to kittens.

The No Kidding Department: Hospitals are depressing

Earlier this week I accompanied Jeff to the emergency room of Royal Columbia Hospital. His ankle was hurting and swollen up like the proverbial balloon, so we went in to have it checked out. Previous appraisals had made a tentative diagnosis of tendinitis and the recommendation to not do anything that would impact the foot (running, etc.) I figured we’d be there for a good while but the emergency room was actually only sparsely populated. It turned out that didn’t matter, as we were there for three hours, anyway.

The first section — the emergency room proper — had a few people with fairly obvious ailments — a woman with her arm in a cast, a man on a gurney wearing a neck brace, while others were harder to pin down — a fussy baby, a young woman carting an IV drip alongside her. The man on the gurney complained of being bored but had four people other than his wife hunkered around him. The discussion was vague but ominous, with talk of blood and such, though none was apparent from where I sat. They eventually wheeled him off.

As we continued to wait, more people were taken past us, many of them heavyset, all of them looking either ill or bored or both. One gurney would be rolled through slowly, another more urgently. We were eventually moved to the ‘minor condition’ section to wait for an x-ray to be done. While there we heard a woman off in another room repeatedly cry out “Ow!” and “Oh!” It sounded like they were murdering her with pins. I started feeling a little squirmy at this point but she eventually fell silent as they either completed the testing/probing or she fainted/died.

She was later wheeled out into the same section as us, an elderly woman who said she had to keep her feet up and yelled at an intern “Don’t touch my finger!” as he tried to move her from a wheelchair that was sans footrest to one that had one. She apologized to him for the outburst then spent the rest of her time repeatedly asking to use someone’s cellphone, as hers had died. I don’t recall her actually making a call despite being handed a phone several times. She was eventually wheeled off and we heard from her no more. This provided some comfort as she was the only patient there actively screaming.

By this time Jeff was taken for x-rays and I went out to feed the maw of the meter in the emergency parking lot, also known as ‘How we keep the hospital solvent by charging the equivalent of a mortgage payment for 3 hours of parking’. There are handy green arrows on the floor to lead you from one section to another, so I would have no problem making my way back in. This was good as every corridor looked the same and equally depressing to me. As it turned out, the green arrows split at one point and I became utterly confused, finding myself in a room I did not recognize, one that was filled with beds and very sick-looking people and curtains that should have been closed but were not so you could see things you didn’t want to see. I turned around a few times and realized why so hospitals are such a great setting for thrillers and horror movies. I made my way back to Jeff in time to look at the x-ray and see the fractured bone in his ankle. The diagnosis was a plaster cast for the day, an appointment with a specialist the next day and probable replacement with a Fiberglas cast in a few days that would be worn for 5-6 weeks, with the fun bonus possibility of surgery if the healing didn’t proceed as desired. Jeff was understandably less than thrilled.

The diagnosis was later changed to an air cast that could be removed for sleeping/showering, with surgery unlikely, so things ended up looking better than they were originally.

About the only thing I liked at the hospital was the Tim Horton’s apple fritter I bought in the coffee shop. We shared it and it was yummy. Other than that, I can’t say I’m anxious to step in one again any time soon. Those places are enough to make you sick.