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Get Me to the ER on Time
Sometimes it's not so easy to get to the ER.
Date: 1/9/2010 12:06:11 PM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 1196 times (This is a continuing saga and I’m not good at recaps. Start here at your own peril.)
At home, I continued to feel lousy, although I acted normal, feeding the horses, watching TV with my husband, surfing the web a bit. But I could feel my heart trying to escape from my chest, not beating quickly or even that hard but just with the unusual sensation of knowing that it was beating and when. It was going to be hard to sleep again, as it had been the previous night, but I was pretty confident it would eventually calm down. I would make that doctor’s appointment first thing in the morning. Damn.
After watching The Daily Show, I got ready for bed. I went to say something to my husband, who was still watching TV in the family room but as I stood in the doorway a wave of dizziness came over me. And I felt just plain weird. Weirder than just being aware of my heartbeat. I sat down at the table.
“Are you okay?”
I shook my head. “There’s something I have to tell you. But first, there’s a blood pressure cuff in that bag on the chair, can you get that out?” At this point I might as well admit that I’d never told my husband any of my blood pressure woes. Let’s say I don’t like to worry him. So he was surprised about the cuff and he was surprised about my whole story. “In fact,” I added at the end, “that cough that you were always telling me I needed to see a doctor about was actually from the lisinopril I was taking for my blood pressure. Isn’t that funny? I was seeing a doctor about it, in a way.” He took it pretty well, considering.
The new cuff, a wrist variety, measured my BP at 180/100. I called my friend who is a nurse. “What do you think, should I go to the ER?” She said yes so off we went.
We live in the no-man’s land outside the limits of a medium-sized city, where suburban sprawl is slowly consuming farms and ranches and turning them into “ranchettes.” It’s a ways to the nearest hospital. My husband drove me in my car because a) my car is clean and b) I didn’t think I was safe to drive. These concessions to circumstances hurt me deeply since my husband is a horrible and slow driver. Turns out there is nothing like a long drive to an ER while you think you might be dying to really bring that out. And I couldn’t say anything.
Along the way there is about a three mile stretch where we go along a two lane road through a subdivision. The speed limit is 35 or 40, depending on the exact part of the road. We ended up behind someone even slower than my husband. In the 40 section, we were going 33, in the 35 section we were going less than 30. I wasn’t in the mood to be patient but my husband was content to follow quietly behind. Plus, what else could we do? So I was relieved when we turned onto a larger road and were able to pass them. The speed limit here was 45 and my husband (let’s call him R.), maddeningly, drove just under that.
In a concession to the fact that I was potentially dying, he stopped at the red light where the street we were on crossed a major highway, saw that there was no traffic anywhere (except that that stupid slow car from the other road had caught up with us) and then ran it. There were actually two lights in a row and he ran the next one too. But he was still driving just under the speed limit where I would have preferred just over.
I blame the fact that the slow car was actually able to catch up with us on R’s slow driving, however he couldn’t have predicted it’s behavior, namely that it pulled in front of us and slowed to a crawl. R changed lanes. The slow car changed lanes. R changed lanes back. The slow car, showing unusual maneuverability, zipped right back in front of us. One more iteration and it let us go. I guess it was mad that we ran the lights. I’m glad its self-righteous anger didn’t kill me.
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