Spent the night in the emergency room
Jul. 28th, 2009 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkOn Monday nights I skate at the Minnetonka ice rink - 90 minutes of practice time and then 30 minutes of ice dancing class. After about an hour of perfectly normal skating, I started seeing quick bright flashes, like somebody was snapping flash pictures just out of my field of vision or trying to deploy a small disco light ball. Class started at 10pm. By 10:15 the flashes were getting more intense and continuous. It became obvious that I was the only one seeing them, and they were always just out of sight to the right. At 10:20 I left the ice and went out to the darker lobby where I discovered that the flashes were not only brought on by moving my eyes to the right but just by blinking. Uh-oh.
Those of you with a family history of severe myopia have probably already recognized this phenomenon as an early sign of detached retina, an eye condition which is every bit as serious as it sounds. My dad had a detached retina back in the late '60's. I remember that he was told to put a patch over his eye and try not to move it until he could be rushed into surgery the next day. This was in the early days of laser eye surgery and the outcome was not great. He didn't lose all vision in that eye, but enough to screw up his depth perception for the rest of his life. So I was pretty scared.
When my classmates emerged from the rink I told them what was going on. The younger ones seemed a little unclear on just what a retina was, but Jon (closer to my age and with a family history of eye problems) immediately named the symptoms without me even having to describe them and urged me to "go in right away." I hadn't realized how unprepared I really am to deal with a health emergency - I didn't even have a current phone number for Park Nicollet with me. I tried calling home, then remembered that Richard and Thorin were at a party in Wisconsin. I couldn't quite figure out what to do - I was getting scared and couldn't focus. My skating buddies helped me dig up the Park Nicollet emergency number. The nurse I talked to thought I should come in and that I shouldn't drive. Now what? Jon offered to drive me to the hospital, and on the way I managed to get hold of Thorin on his cell. I just had Jon drop me at the hospital, figuring I'd be there at least a couple of hours, plenty of time for my family to get back to town to pick me up. Well, I was right, there was PLENTY of time. I had no idea.
Remind me not to ever seek health care again from an emergency room unless I'm arriving in an ambulance. Oy. I got there about 11:15pm and finally staggered back out at 6:25am. That's more than 7 hours. They were neither uncaring nor incompetent, just massively understaffed. The ambulances with the serious cases were pulling up to a different door, thank goodness, so we weren't surrounded by the kind of thing you see on E.R. with blood spurting and people running around screaming "Stat!" But there were ambulance victims and they were quite properly triaged ahead of the sad and stoic afflicted who weren't convulsing or leaking bodily fluids. I think 3 hours went by when not a single person from that waiting room was called.
I finally got my turn with the harried doctor that was treating all the non-critical cases and was impressed how much time she spent with me. Unfortunately, she was not an eye specialist so she couldn't really do much beyond ruling out obvious problems like a foreign object lodged in my eye or slightly less obvious possibilities like a stroke. She spent a lot of time peering into my eyes with various types of lights, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. But I clearly was having these disturbing symptoms, so all she could do was write up a discharge order saying that I had a "likely posterior detachment of the retina" and needed to be seen by an opthamologist the next day. I don't know if that helped me get the appointment right away or not. I still had to call and make the appointment myself after the switchboard opened.
Various nurses took my blood pressure repeatedly, coming up with truly alarming readings. Even considering my rather agitated state, the first readings were so mind-boggling that I can't quite remember the numbers: things like 190/110 (remember 120/80 is "normal"). My bp is very unstable and it is not unusual for it to spike as HIGH as 150/90 in a doctor's office. But this was the first time that 150/90 was the LOWEST number they came up with. Yikes. Something has changed dramatically in the blood pressure area in the last year, and I'm going to have to follow up on that.
But ultimately, after a whole night in the arms of the health care sytem, I really didn't know any more than I did when I came in (except that I probably need to do something about the blood pressure). To be continued.
Those of you with a family history of severe myopia have probably already recognized this phenomenon as an early sign of detached retina, an eye condition which is every bit as serious as it sounds. My dad had a detached retina back in the late '60's. I remember that he was told to put a patch over his eye and try not to move it until he could be rushed into surgery the next day. This was in the early days of laser eye surgery and the outcome was not great. He didn't lose all vision in that eye, but enough to screw up his depth perception for the rest of his life. So I was pretty scared.
When my classmates emerged from the rink I told them what was going on. The younger ones seemed a little unclear on just what a retina was, but Jon (closer to my age and with a family history of eye problems) immediately named the symptoms without me even having to describe them and urged me to "go in right away." I hadn't realized how unprepared I really am to deal with a health emergency - I didn't even have a current phone number for Park Nicollet with me. I tried calling home, then remembered that Richard and Thorin were at a party in Wisconsin. I couldn't quite figure out what to do - I was getting scared and couldn't focus. My skating buddies helped me dig up the Park Nicollet emergency number. The nurse I talked to thought I should come in and that I shouldn't drive. Now what? Jon offered to drive me to the hospital, and on the way I managed to get hold of Thorin on his cell. I just had Jon drop me at the hospital, figuring I'd be there at least a couple of hours, plenty of time for my family to get back to town to pick me up. Well, I was right, there was PLENTY of time. I had no idea.
Remind me not to ever seek health care again from an emergency room unless I'm arriving in an ambulance. Oy. I got there about 11:15pm and finally staggered back out at 6:25am. That's more than 7 hours. They were neither uncaring nor incompetent, just massively understaffed. The ambulances with the serious cases were pulling up to a different door, thank goodness, so we weren't surrounded by the kind of thing you see on E.R. with blood spurting and people running around screaming "Stat!" But there were ambulance victims and they were quite properly triaged ahead of the sad and stoic afflicted who weren't convulsing or leaking bodily fluids. I think 3 hours went by when not a single person from that waiting room was called.
I finally got my turn with the harried doctor that was treating all the non-critical cases and was impressed how much time she spent with me. Unfortunately, she was not an eye specialist so she couldn't really do much beyond ruling out obvious problems like a foreign object lodged in my eye or slightly less obvious possibilities like a stroke. She spent a lot of time peering into my eyes with various types of lights, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. But I clearly was having these disturbing symptoms, so all she could do was write up a discharge order saying that I had a "likely posterior detachment of the retina" and needed to be seen by an opthamologist the next day. I don't know if that helped me get the appointment right away or not. I still had to call and make the appointment myself after the switchboard opened.
Various nurses took my blood pressure repeatedly, coming up with truly alarming readings. Even considering my rather agitated state, the first readings were so mind-boggling that I can't quite remember the numbers: things like 190/110 (remember 120/80 is "normal"). My bp is very unstable and it is not unusual for it to spike as HIGH as 150/90 in a doctor's office. But this was the first time that 150/90 was the LOWEST number they came up with. Yikes. Something has changed dramatically in the blood pressure area in the last year, and I'm going to have to follow up on that.
But ultimately, after a whole night in the arms of the health care sytem, I really didn't know any more than I did when I came in (except that I probably need to do something about the blood pressure). To be continued.
