The fear of god
posted in Uncategorized |OmegaDad tells me that after the EMT dudes loaded me onto the ambulance, he stood in the doorway of the Shoebox’s bedroom and thought to himself, “I have to figure out something to say to the dotter, and it has to be true enough…just in case.”
Just in case.
The whole episode was really scary. Just scared the snot out of me.
OmegaDad will tell you that it takes a lot to make me say I’m going to go to the doctor, and having me wake him up in the middle of the night to say, “I need to go to the emergency room” was enough to wake him up right away. Actually, I told him, “I’m going to drive myself to the emergency room”, an idea which he nixed immediately, and as he was taking more and more time to get ready to drive me, I finally gasped out, “Call an ambulance.”
He says he was truly worried that he was going to have to deal with me dying. I am under strict orders to Never Do Anything Like That Again.
Trust me, I don’t plan to.
It’s a very odd feeling, to be sitting on the floor in wild excruciating pain, wondering, “Is this it?” I spent the time in the hospital mostly snoozing. OmegaDad brought in the laptop yesterday morning, and I would turn it on, sign on, start reading email and blogs and news and stuff, and then *poof* would be asleep again.
Sleep, as I may have mentioned before, is my ultimate response to stress.
I was…well, under a certain amount of stress. Less so as time went on (particularly after my cardiologist–now that’s a weird phrase, “my cardiologist”–informed me that pericarditis is about as “significant as a sore throat”). I got to see my heart a-throbbin’ and a-pumpin’ away during the echocardiogram, an ultrasound of the heart. The dude doing the echocardiogram informed me that I had a “nice, shiny pericardium”; I don’t think anyone’s complimented me in quite that way before. Watching the activity of the heart was fascinating; the mitral valve flutters like a mechanical flap, up, down, up, down, while the heart is quivering and pumping. The ultrasound equipment also will show, in color-coded glory, the blood that is entering the heart versus the blood that is exiting the heart, in orange and blue flashes.
Way cool to a nerd like me.
But still. There I was, having spent a few hours thinking I was dying.
That’s scary shit.
So I slept. And slept and slept. You’d think, after all that sleeping, that I’d be nice and rested, but right now all I want to do is…sleep. Because I’m still all shook up, and sleep is the best way to escape being all shook up.
OmegaDad says that the dotter was very upset and really, really wanted me back at home. I really, really wanted to be back at home, too, once the drugs knocked the inflammation on its butt and I could finally sleep on my side without feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest and kicking me every time I took a deep breath.
All of this is more than anyone needs to know, I’d guess. But it’s kind of a way for me to work through it, to realize that (a) I thought I was dying, and (b) whew! No, I wasn’t. Both of them take some processing, some thinking about.
