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As if the last few weeks had not been dramatic enough, I spent yesterday and last night at the emergency room with Bruce. It started on Sunday, early afternoon, with stomach pains, much like the ones he’d been having on the day after Christmas. The pains went on for the rest of that day and into the night. He suffered all night, thinking that he was just constipated or something. But the next morning after normal bathroom activities, the pain had not gone away and was just as strong.

Now if you know my husband, he will avoid the emergency room like it is the plague. And so, when I got home from Cade’s karate class on Monday afternoon, and he said he wanted me to take him to the hospital, I knew it was bad.

We got there around three-thirtyish. And at first I thought it was all going to go fast because nobody was there yet. It’s probably the best time to show up with a problem. Bruce had called his gastro-doc and found out that he would be making rounds at the hospital and that’s why we came. But he never did come by to check on us.

The first thing they did was give Bruce an IV and take some blood. Then they brought in a pain shot, Dilaudid. Bruce has never been drunk before and the nurse told him that he would feel like he was drunk. He was immediately weirded out by the rush of fuzziness that swept to his head, but thought it was normal.

Within about 30 minutes he started experiencing extreme chest pain. I’ve never seen such a panicked look on my husband’s face. He’s such a strong person. But this was a scary feeling. He said it felt like the muscles in his chest were being constricted from the inside and out. I went and got the PA and she called for the EKG cart. Suddenly, his little cubicle was filled with people and carts and beeping monitors.

He was now wearing an oxygen mask, a blood pressure cuff, the blood oxygen thing on his finger, an IV and about eight different wires leading to his ankles, wrists and points on his chest. The EKG said his heart beats were down in the 30’s, but that he had stabilized now in the 50’s and 60’s. Problem was that he was still feeling horrible.   He couldn’t get comfortable. He wanted to lay down, but that felt awful, then he wanted to sit up, but that was awful too. He was sweating profusely, but at the same time he was so cold that his feet and hands had turned blue. And like I said, he was really nervous and panicky. It was a horrible thing to see.

They decided to treat him for a heart attack and brought in some nitroglycerin paste for his chest and a nitroglycerin tablet for under his tongue. After about a half an hour, he started to feel a lot better.

During this time, the next PA assigned to my husband decided that he should try an internal exam. But backed off when he saw the obvious discomfort Bruce was still in. After that we spent a lot of time waiting. The PA came back in much later and checked Bruce’s prostate, just to rule it out, and it was fine.

At this point, I was beginning to feel like we were in an episode of House, where the patient has all kinds of things done to him that make him feel worse, and almost DIE! It was totally frustrating.

They wanted him to have a CAT scan with contrast, so he had to drink 32 oz. of this watery liquid stuff and then go down to be scanned. While he was waiting he did a bit of napping. They had doped him up with some morphine to take the edge off of his stomach pain and it was finally working. But the morphine was also making his blood pressure drop like crazy, which they said was normal for that drug, but it was weird to me.

My saving grace, while we were there, was that I had come directly from karate, where I usually spend the time reading. And I had started a good James Patterson book, Witch & Wizard, which I was enjoying. AND I happened to have Cade’s new toy in my purse, an iPod touch. That thing was amazing. I could play games, surf the internet and go on Facebook to update my family on Bruce’s condition. My phone wouldn’t work, but the internet did. Isn’t that bizarre?

Round about midnight, our third PA and our second shift nurse came in to discuss the results of the tests. The cardiac enzyme test that they had run on his blood came back fine. And the contrasted CAT scan showed an infection in his colon with a thickened area that was causing a blockage. They also saw some diverticuli, which are small, protruding sacs on the inner lining of the intestine.

They also decided that the cardiac ‘incident’ was really just a reaction to the Dilaudid pain medicine, so they put that on his forever chart, just in case we EVER forget that it almost killed him.

They gave him more pain meds, prescriptions for two antibiotics and pain medicine for home and we finally left the ER around 1:00 in the morning, a nine and a half hour ordeal. It could have been worse, though. I was envisioning them admitting him at some point and I knew that he really didn’t want to stay.

Today he’s still in a bit of pain, but it’s manageable. He’s got to go back to his gastro-doc and I’m sure the doctor is going to want to do another colonoscopy.

But Bruce is home and feeling better and I’m very thankful for that.

Can I now have some peace?

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