A Banner Health Day

Or not, as the case may be. I woke up yesterday morning with a raging respiratory infection that seemed to have morphed overnight from the sore throat I'd had since Tuesday. I conveniently already had a doctor's appointment scheduled for midmorning due to the abscess on my scar from surgery six months ago. I know I shouldn't be getting abscesses this long after the surgery, but someone forgot to tell my body. Apparently, I'm stitch-absorbing challenged.

Anyhoo, so doc appointment goes fine and he writes me a prescription for cough syrup with codeine so I'm not up all night coughing. The wound has pretty much self-healed (I'll spare you the gory details and you're welcome), so we're just going to keep an eye on it and forego the antibiotics for now. Ok, fine, sure. So, I spend the day pretty much feeling like shit-on-a-stick and popping ibuprofen left, right, and center and a generic dayquil thingy at about 3:00 or 4:00. Typical sick day, right? Ah, a hasty conclusion, my friend.

It gets on toward evening and I'm planning on hitting the sack soon, so I spoon myself up some cough syrup. About an hour later, around 9:30, I get hit with an esophageal spasm the likes of which I have not felt in years. Now, for those of you unfamiliar, an esophageal spasm causes a "squeezing type of chest pain that feels just like heart pain (angina)," to put it mildly. I end up kneeling on the floor with my forehead pressed against the floorboards, whimpering, and endlessly repeating, "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God." Poor Jason has never actually witnessed one of these attacks before but luckily, by the time he heard me and came to check on me, I had enough of my breath back to at least give him an idea of what was going on. Unfortunately, the spasms just kept coming. I managed to get back in bed for the rest of them but this just leads to me flopping around like a fish out of water trying to find some position, any position, that might alleviate the nigh unbearable pain. I tend to curl up in a ball around a pillow and try to get my chest higher than my head--I don't know why, it's just what instinct leads me to do. And I endlessly repeat either the "Oh God" phrase above or "No, no, no" or "Why, why, why?" or some such inane idiocy. I did have the presence of mind to avoid "Help me" and "Make it stop" because I knew poor Jason could do neither.

I think I must have had about five episodes within the space of an hour and because of that damned codeine in the cough syrup, I couldn't take a muscle relaxer and didn't know if I could take a painkiller or not. Jason was starting to freak and I was as wrung out as a dishrag, so we called the hospital to see if there was anything I could safely take. They were unwilling to suggest anything on the phone because of the possibility of an allergic reaction (and also a liability issue, I'm guessing) and recommended that we come in to the E/R. Several hours, an EKG, a chest X-ray, a couple of valium, and a late-night episode of What Not to Wear later, I was released on my own recognizance and into the care of Bossy McBosserson, the alter ego of my mild-mannered husband. One, ok two, little sedatives for me and my, but doesn't he feel awfully superior all of a sudden. I think he's just envious that he doesn't share the same strength of character (read: mind-altering drugs) that enables me to happily be seen in Safeway in the middle of the night in my pink Supergirl pajamas while still wearing my hospital ID bracelet. Party on, Wayne. And a happy Friday the 13th to you all.