Fun with Electrodes

Friends… I had a rough night. Yesterday morning when I woke up I could not catch my breath no matter how hard I tried. As a card-carrying severe asthmatic, this was a feeling that I was intimately aware of… but for some reason, this felt different. My lungs were clear and I seemed to not be having any difficulty breathing. This went away and as the day moved forward I just sort of felt a general sense of “shitty”. I was having occasional abdominal pains and side pains but never the sort of thing that you could really pin down to anything. I had a wild headache and as I went into the evening the unable to catch my breath part carried forward and was joined by what I can only term a “flutter” in my heart where it felt like it would race for a few seconds and give me a “whoa that does not feel right” feeling and then return to normal.

So around 9 pm, I decided we probably needed to go to the ER when I finally found my damned blood pressure cuff and got a reading of 155/99. This is one of those shitty wrist things so not exactly accurate but considering it was reading my wife as normal… I decided it warranted a trip. By the time I made it to the ER and was seen by their triage folks my blood pressure was 210/110 and my inability to catch my breath was pretty much a constant. So I spent my evening hooked to electrodes, with an IV in my arm, and everything angrily beeping at me. I am okay… other than the fact that I am exhausted still and also generally feel like crap. I just sort of feel like I fell down the stairs or something because everything aches.

The takeaway… inconclusive. I was in fact having some sort of very high blood pressure moment. However, there is no clear sign as to why. My blood panels came back fine as did both a COVID and Flu test. I spent the entire evening hooked up to an EKG yoke… which also came back fine and I was told by the ER doctor that for the most part things looked healthy and operating as expected. So we have this situation where I was obviously in some form of distress but there were no physiological signs for why. Their working theory is that I have some sort of viral infection because there were signs that my body was trying to fight off something. Throughout the evening they called out a handful of things that mostly blurred by as I was fading in out and out.

At some point, they gave me a cocktail of meds intravenously and the rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. They also called in a prescription for a dose pack of steroids, but we were far too out of it last night to wait for the pharmacy to fill that. So at some point today I am going to go pick that up. Essentially today I am going to try and take it easy, and get some sleep/rest. I mostly feel bad for putting my wife through all of this and giving her what is going to be a rough day after very little sleep. I feel simultaneously dumb for going to the ER and also vindicated that something was in fact going on… enough to cause my blood pressure to spike so high. I do feel a bit better though that from all signs my heart seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do. My X-Rays basically showed the shit state of my lungs… but that is to be expected for a 47-year-old with severe asthma.

Anyways. This is the sort of post that I make and then do not syndicate at all. This is only for myself and my most dedicated readers. I use my blog as a way of marking major events in my life along with the normal shenanigans that I get up to. It would feel weird NOT to record this event for posterity.