Pop’s Page

Just to make life interesting for Kevin, about once a year I have her drive me to the local ER at Medical Center of Plano. Last June (06), I woke up with severe chest pain mimicing a heart attack at 2 am. That wasn’t so fun for her. As it turned out my heart was fine, and 5 months later I had my gall bladder out, which SHOULD eliminate any more trips of that kind. Some skeptics would say I arranged all this so I could watch the World Cup from the private quarters of the ER while retaining sympathy from certain significant others. While that actually happened, I want to reassure such skeptics that I find soccer (or fotbol as they say) B O R I N G, particularly when the championship is decided by penalty kicks. The Wall St. Journal had a great story about all this, whose link I have lost, but basically points out that there’s gotta be something wrong with a game that refuses to protect the most important part of the body (the head) while using it to score goals! But I digress.

The latest trip was yesterday. It was occasioned by an assemblage of factors that conspired to overcome my natural aversion to making trips of this kind. When I awoke yesterday, I found that upon standing by the bed I could not stand by the bed. That little computer in the brain that tells you which way is up/down left/right was seeming in a suspended state. I tended to rotate to the left while leaning toward the same direction. My first thought as a physicist was that the Coriolis force had somehow strengthened during the night. This would have vast geophysical implications, including ones that should have been apparent in the ceiling fan rotating above me. Since it seemed to be humming along quite nicely, thank-you, it began to dawn on me that it was I, not the rotating earth, that was experiencing abnormal rotation.This was confirmed by the funny feeling of pressure in my head and my subsequent walk toward the bathroom, staggering like a drunken sailor on a pitching 4-master. (We had viewed Pirates of the Caribbean recently.) I finally staggered my way to the kitchen to imbibe a hot cup of tea, 2 ibuprofens and an aspirin in case it was a Sxxxxx (the dreaded S word for a person of my age and heart history.) These actions settled me down somewhat, and my walking became semi-normal, although Kevin noted I tended to tilt left.

I decided the best course of action was to wait the malady out by resting, and watching the 17 episodes of The Dog Whisperer that we have recorded during Dog Whisperer Week on the NGO channel, which we dutifully search to see if Cesar Millan EVER takes a fearful passive dog, like our Callie, and makes them into an aggressive dog–a state we would dearly love to achieve for our Shih Tzu, about whom the Rescue folks said was “she is the shyest dog we’ve ever seen.” So far, no results. He always is doing the opposite: taking aggressive dogs and making them calm again. I’d love to see our Callie be aggressive for just one minute, enough to play “tug with socks” like ole Alexander the daschund, who finally had to be given away when he chewed up the lady-of-the-house’s precious sofa one day. But that, too, is another story.

One of the advantages of marrying into a family of sisters, several of whom hold degrees in the medical field, is that you get focused attention on any medical issue. Before long, the sisterly communication network had kicked into gear with Kevin talking to Linda who talked to Laura, who was vacationing in Colorado. So it wasn’t surprising to me that by late afternoon I got a call from Laura who wanted to discuss with me my symptoms. It’s not for nothing that Laura won “Woman of the Year.” In her gentle but persuasive way she pointed out that my initial symptoms where consistent with the classic symptoms of a mini-stroke or TIA, that it was easier to treat an impending major stroke before you got one (the TIA being a warning sign that one was coming), and that major strokes tend to be irreversible. Couple that with my age and my previous heart conditions made for a strong case to take action. Such compelling logic was hard to resist, supported by my strong Presbyterian belief in providence, so I decided to follow Laura’s advice “to be seen today” by a medical practitioner who could do classic blood tests and scans to “manage by fact”.

Even then I opted for the simplest route: to go to the Primacare facility next to our church. I went to their web page to check their hours, and sure enough they were closing in 5 minutes. Sigh. So hoping to avoid the ER, I called my personal doctor’s line and got the covering doctors callback number. Dr. Torres responded quickly, and after a short discussion of my symptoms, he said: “it’s probably not a stroke, but you really should be seen just in case.” Not finding that he was volunteering to see me, the inevitable conclusion was: “go to the ER and take a long book.”

So off we went down Bush Turnpike toward the Medical Center of Plano with Kevin driving. This time it was 6 PM and not 2 AM. Before leaving I packed up my new laptop with 4 DVDs including the Amadeus bonus disc (we’d just watched the Director’s Cut the night before), the Firefly episodes I’d not yet watched, and the “In the Steps of Jesus” which I had just purchased from the History Channel, and prepared myself for a LONG stay. But a funny thing happened on the way to the comfy chairs in the waiting room. When I happened to mention the S word, everything changed fast. I bypassed all that yawning crowd waiting to be seen, and immediately had my shirt stripped off, and many, many electrodes placed on my chest, side, legs, etc. In 5 minutes of arriving I was already having an EKG. Five minutes later I was in a room deep in the bowels of the ER, with an IV, an arm cuff for BP, and all these wires monitoring my heart rate. 5 minutes later Dr. Meek arrived, looked at my ears to determine that the left one was filled with fluid, and who then paced me through a battery of tests to see how my brain was operating, including the game where he holds up his fingers and I attempt to touch them. I did. His comment: “it’s probably not a stoke but we’re going to check to make sure.”

Checking to make sure meant: blood tests, CT scan, chest X-ray. So, I did get to use my laptop after all (I watched “In the Footsteps of Jesus”). My faithful wife shivered in the cold ER room with a blanket around her and became an expert in the King Tuts and their female Pharoah relative on the History Channel. (Why do we like that channel so much?) Finally, the doc returned and pronounced his judgment: no sign of a stroke; evidence of sinusitis and blocked eustachian tube. He gave me a steroid shot, and a prescription for an antibiotic, nasal spray and another steroid and sent me on my way.

By this time it was 9 PM and we hadn’t had any supper. So in celebration of a better outcome than might have been expected, we did the drive-thru line, ordered two Whataburgers, (and I got a malt) and drove home. We even got back in time to watch our favorite British sitcom: As Time Goes By. In this episode the 60-something husband Lionel is told by his wife (played by Judi Dench) that he’s hard of hearing. It had a familiar ring to it and was a perfect close to a somewhat imperfect day.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 8:57 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.