Christmas on the Cardio Ward

Ho ho ho and happy belated holidays my faithful readers. I hope you all had a Currier and Ives day. Sadly, I did not. Oh, no, I did not. Why you ask? Well, sit back and let me tell you. Christmas Eve started out quite well with a trip to the mall, just for fun. No presents needed to be bought, but hey, why not go watch other people scramble? After an hour of two wanering around the mall, we headed home and hung out for a while, before having a lovely dinner of steamed crabs, baked potatoes and salad. After dinner it was time for the wee one to go to bed (visions of a bug vacuum he desperately wanted from Santa dancing in his head), and then we watched the greatest Christmas movie of all time, Holiday Inn, while drinking hot chocolate. Doesn't that sound lovely and stress free? Well, it was. Santa came by, ate a few cookies, drank his milk, left some presents and filled the stockings (with a bit of help) and it was off to bed. Ah, nice relaxing Christmas. Wrong! Around 10 to midnight I woke up in agony. Ag-ony. My chest felt like it was in a vise grip. I assumed it was heartburn (though I never suffer from it, and had eaten nothing that would cause it), so I took some Pepcid and waited for it to go away. It did not. I argued against going to the hospital, as I knew I would miss Christmas morning, so I dealt with it in semi-silence (there was a bit of moaning and groaning I have to admit). I couldn't lay down because it got worse, so I sat up on the sofa until I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. We opened presents around 8 am, which was everything I thought it would be, and Santa, that crafty old elf, did indeed bring the much coveted bug vacuum eliciting squeels of delight and striking terror in the heart of bugs everywhere. After presents, I decided I could deal with the pain no longer and carted myself off to the ER, where I was immediately wisked to the back ahead of several people who loked like they had been there quite a while. Suck on that broken-arm-while-trying-to-do-stupid-tricks-on my-new-skateboard-kid. I was given an EKG (good), hooked up to a million machines, poked proded, stabbed with many needles and made to drink horrible, horrible concoctions that no one should ever have to taste. I was exhibiting all the symptoms of a heart attack. What? I'm 34, I eat well, work out regularly and have none of the risks, but there I was, attached to monitor, in dreadful pain and apparently having a heart attack. Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la.-la-la. Around noon they decided to do an MRI and inject dye into my IV. Guess what? Turns out I'm allergic to the CT dye and almost instantly broke out into hives. Fun! This lead to a shot of Benadryl that knocked me out and was the first time in hours I felt no pain. God bless the makes of Benadryl. I awoke from my drug induced stupor to be given nitro glycerin pills and blood thinning shots in the stomach. Ouch! This was not the Christmas I'd planed, let me tell you. It was then decided that while my heart seemed to be fine, they wanted to keep me. In the hostpital. In the cardio ward. I was so not happy, but what was I going to do? They wheeled me up to the third floor where I was easily the youngest person on the ward by a good 30-40 years. In fact, my roommate had 58 years on me. That right, I spent Christmas with a 92 year old, who, just in case you were curious, was incredibly flatulent. God Bless us everyone! They took me out for a while to do some more tests and I was being wheeled down the hall, I could feel the eyes of the other patients whose rooms we passes boring into me. I imagined they were wondering if my heart was bad, and how they might get hold of it to replace their failing tickers. I hugged my blankets protectively over my chest and trid to look sicker than I already was. Once back to the relative safety of my room, I kept my eye on the door and the nurse buzzer in my hand, just in case they decided to hobble to my room zombie like to check out my heart. I got almost no sleep, as the nurses kept coming in every hour to check my stats (my bp was crazy low-68/40) and every 2 hours to take blood. Plus, I had to keep my eyes out for the other patients. They can be surprisingly crafty at getting those heart monitors wheeled down the hall and I was taking no chances. They might have stashed a butter knife from the oh so delicious (and sodium free) Christmas dinner and attempt to crack my chest open with it. Trust no one!
So, after a night of no sleep, more medications than I probablytaken in the past year and enough needle sticks to make me look like a junkie, it was concluded that I had something called chostochondritues. What, not up on your obscure chest ailments? Let me put it in lay terms for you: it's an inflamation of the sternum and cartilidge that connects to the ribs. It mimicks the syptoms of heart attacks and can only be diagnosed after ruling out everything else. Also, it hurts like a beeyotch. I was given some (more) anti-inflamatories, some happy pain meds (now we're talking) and discharged. We had Christmas dinner a day late, but still, I was with my family and friends and with the exception of not being able to drink any alchohol (something about not mixing alchohol and pills, but hey, celebs do it all the time, and look how well it works for them) it was lovely. Hope you all had a wonderful holiday! Bring on New Year!