Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007 - 11:25 p.m.

I am reposting from elsewhere, because I still have a headache and some nausea, so I hope those of you who also look at my myspace photo/survey blog will forgive me.

I got to work at 8:45am yesterday. At 9:15, I realized I was having issues with my right eye, what with my vision being all blurry and the sensation of some kind of filmy goopy stuff in my eye. When it wouldn't clear, I decided my glasses must be schmutzy, so I headed to the rest room to clean them, where I realized my right pupil was gigantically bigger than my left. As in David Bowie bigger. As in not much actual blue around it while the other one looked just fine. Then the nausea hit, followed about 20 minutes later by dizziness and a slamming headache. There was a nurse in the store who heard me comment on this and immediately gave me a quick once over and told me to get to a hospital. So I did.

And got booked in for more tests than I've ever had in my entire life: catscan, 2 MRI's, TEE, echocardiogram, 2 "bubble tests," a full panel of blood work, neurological reflexy testing, another full panel of blood work after fasting overnight, a heart monitor I wore around my neck the whole time I was in there, and just for the hell of it, a pneumonia shot (my roommate for the night had it, so I got shot for it). I saw the ER doc, a neurologist, a blood doc, a cardiologist, an anesthesiologist, and more nurses and technicians than you could shake a stick at. I got punctured no fewer than 3 times, had 10+ tubes of blood drawn, was pumped up with iodine and high contrast gel (the iodine sucked it), and was knocked out for 20 minutes while they fed a tube down my throat for the TEE to look at the backside of my heart. They took my blood pressure every 20 minutes until I went up to my room, where they took it every 2 hours, come hell or high water. I had to go without food or water for over 15 hours and was super dehydrated by the time I was finally allowed to drink. (jeebus, water tastes good) They made me sign a form saying I understood that one possible complication of the TEE was the doc accidentally punching a hole in my esophogus, and then literally 10 minutes before they did the proceedure, there was an earthquake that shook the building. And the drug they gave me to knock me out made me loopy as hell in the roughly 5.2 seconds between when they injected it into my line and the second I realized, "Hey, there are 6 of you there in the flowered scrubs holding the monitor, and you're all swimming. Please stop swirling around like that."

I have a perfect heart, perfect brain, and probably perfect blood.

I also had a $1200 migraine.

Dude.

Things I learned today are that if you must get sick, West Hills Hospital is fully the place to go. Zofram is the single best anti-nausea medication on the face of the planet. Naphcon-A can really fuck up your pupils, despite the ultra-innocuous label that casually mentions it might "temporarily enlarge" your pupils, that makes it sound like maybe for a few seconds or so, your pupils might go up in size a tad. It does NOT tell you it might make them so huge that your eyes are nothing but black disks, and that that might last for well over 12 hours, LONG past the time the drug actually helps you with your allergies. The "bubble test" is painful. So are pneumonia shots and having a line removed from inside your elbow. It is really difficult to sleep with a hard piece of plastic inserted just inside your elbow (and a bulky chest monitor hanging from your neck). My cholesterol is a tad high. Watching your own heart beating on a monitor is freaking cool. I am indeed claustrophobic. Counting backward from 500 is so relaxing, it can actually make you fall asleep inside an MRI. I would prefer not to be shot up with iodine, thank you very much. (It makes you feel really, really hot everywhere, including your throat.) People who have no health insurance are utterly fucked when stuff like this happens. And if one of your pupils is larger than the other, you should go to a hospital, but be prepared to be admitted for a barrage of tests and an overnight stay, and know that it will probably cost a great deal of money but might still turn out to be nothing more than a migraine.

::sigh::

Peace out,
Katie

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