Tuesday around 1pm I cut a small area of grass, perhaps 25foot long and 2 foot wide, it was humid. My pulse had gone to 88bpm, and I felt a bit weak and shaky. My pulse seldom gets above 60-70. I decided to lay down for a short nap and still felt bad when I got up.   After the feeling didn’t pass, I discovered my pulse was now at 125bpm and BP was 190/111. I had her call the paramedics, and they determined I was in afib. So off to the big city. There they found the bpm at 152 and pressure slightly higher than a few minutes before.

I got placed in a holding room in the ER, and attended to by the cardiac team. The hospital was over capacity due to Covid restrictions. There were no rooms available, so the ER was catching the overflow with some patients on beds in the hall of the ER unit. A room was assigned to me due to it being a cardiac event. The next 26 hours would be spent on a bed made for a torture dungeon. The mattress was only about two inches thick, just under those two inches felt like a set of monkey bars from a playground. One was situated across the lower back where my back is damaged. Another was in my mid-cervical region, right below the discs in my neck that are ruptured. The bed felt like it was only about 2 feet wide, with rails that might bend over if you looked at them hard.

Fewer amenities than a prison cell

This was the emergency room part of the large hospital. They really aren’t set up for patients to be held there. The work flow of the staff is geared towards trauma, not daily care. Short staffed, and overworked. Day staff members were wonderful, the night shift couldn’t care less. In this room where I would spend 26 hours of my life, I had fewer amenities than a prison cell. No bathroom, no table, no water, and a good one to 1.5 hour wait if you called for any non-emergency help, like water. No pillow until 9 hours later, and never got a blanket until 30 mins before discharge.

A bed, a sink, various medical monitors, that no one seemed to monitor. The monitor was even turned off/muted at one point due to it alarming so often from my pulse and blood pressure. There was a 14-inch TV mounted to the wall, but it was askew to my plane of vision, so it could hardly be watched comfortably. No remote and just on one channel. Reality TV and infomercials. Karma, it would seem, felt I needed a lesson of some sort, I hate reality TV. When I first arrived, I had to request one of those plastic urinals. 26 hours later, as I left, it was still sitting on the floor nearly full.

That’s how crazy things were there. The doctor, on the night shift, forgot to start my aFib medicine after the IV bottle ran out, so I had to stay an extra length of time. I only got one dose of BP medicine, none of my usual pain medicine for my back and neck, so the BP stayed pretty high the entire time. I swear it was a nightmare. It was more like an apocalyptic movie. People screaming, someone coughing their lungs out. A poor elderly woman was in a bed just outside my door in the hallway.

Lord help me, it’s Adam and Eve tonight.

At one point around 3am, after having waited an hour to get someone to unhook me, so I could get out of bed to use the urinal, I finally took it upon myself and just stretched the wires and tubes, so I could exit the bed and get back in it. Of course, that set off all kinds of blaring alarms on the monitors. Upon crawling/ flopping back onto the torture bed, I noticed an infomercial coming on for “Adam and Eve”. You just can’t make this stuff up! They were starting a review of their top nine (count’em NINE) vibrating sex toys. I had no way to change the channel, reach the power cord, or anything to throw at the TV. I just knew the cute little nurses were going to arrive for that call I had put in over an hour ago, and would walk in with that stuff playing. Not only that, but I lay there for 30 minutes, holding my breath hoping the door would not pop open, while witnessing some of the most bizarre things people can think of that have high hormone levels. Thankfully, no one came in during the very detailed review of the merchandise.

Michelle arrived around 8 am. When I started complaining about the last few hours, she says, “My, your grumpy this morning.”

But I’m home now, trying to un-kink my back and neck from the torture bed. All is well in the kingdom again.

How was your last trip to the hospital?