I'm Special :)

Trip to the ER

At 4am I couldn't stand the pain any longer and took a cab to Mt. Sinai's emergency room. No waiting, they just took my symptoms, found me a bed, and started lining up the tests.

The beds are lined up one after another with only a curtain dividing each little stall - like animals in their stalls. I could hear the poor girl next to me whimpering and crying as the nurse tried to take her blood. I felt horrible for her as I could almost feel her tension as the nurse just kept telling her 'tranquile' and to relax, as if that is something a young, scared girl could do in such circumstances. The most entertaining patient was this one woman determined to talk her doctor into giving her morphine; she didn't 'want' it, she 'needed' it. Later I heard her cussing up a storm when the nurse told her the doctor wouldn't be back until 9am.

So after the pee-cup, some chest x-rays, drawing blood, and an EKG, I was trying to nap. The nurse had just plugged me into the heart monitoring and blood pressure machines when they decided to roll me into another, private room. How nice! Everyone was so nice and attentive in the ER, I just figured that they felt I needed some privacy, away from F-bomb druggies and people puking in the trash cans. No less than four resident doctors came to see me during the course of me absorbing two bags of IV antibiotics and three bags of fluids. All had lots of questions about my bronchiectasis, if I'd been tested for TB, HIV, Chrohn's disease, Kartagener syndrome, on and on. One of the residents came in to explain there was pneumonia showing on the x-ray, specifically a blob on my upper left chest. So that was the sharp pain I felt! He then said they were waiting for a bed to admit me :( Yikes! I didn't expect that. I was just hoping to get some good antibiotics and be on my way. Then, after the second male resident came in wearing a tight blue mask to talk and ask a lot of the same questions I already answered with the first two residents, did it dawn on me - they think I'm contagious! And here I thought I was just getting special service because I was so nice; turns out they just thought I was infectious.

To finally at around 11:30 am another resident came in and said they talked with my pumonologist, Dr. I, and they'd release me. Yeah. I was feeling much better after the IV drugs - no joint pain and I could breathe better. He told me to continue with my antibiotics, gave me a new prescription for the nausea (puke up my meds the night before), and said the doctor wanted me to come in on Monday. So I caught a cab home and it feels great to be comfy in my clean sheets with no joint pain or fever. Good health is sooooo under appreciated until you get sick.