The Tricky Ticker...

 And the Drain saga continues...SADLY!!!

As the evening went on....still no drainage....not good!!  I was getting sorer and sorer and more swollen with still minimal (if any) drainage happening...so I called a friend, who is a doctor, to have him come and just check that all the locks and stops in all this mass of tubing we all open and theoretically ready to do their job.  He gave me the "ok" but told me if I got really uncomfortable with all the swelling then maybe another ER visit would be the best but it was totally up to me to judge.  Honestly I was beginning to feel kinda lousy but still couldn't decide.  ER visits are my biggest indecisive hurdle...I will go back and forth and still never decide....if I was in big trouble I would probably still debate with myself till I talked myself out of it.  It is just such a long wait and if you don't look as bad as you feel then you keep sitting in limbo & sadly (after yrs of debilitating migraine headaches) I can put on a real "Oscar" performance & downplay just how bad I feel.  If your pleasant and cordial the medical staff don't think you can be feeling that bad.....if they only knew.  I digress....anyway after spending the evening with a dear friend, Miss M, I was still humming and hawing about what to do but in the end, the fact that my doctor friend had said maybe I should go....I blamed him and said okay BUT...if they couldn't do anything about this drain tonight...I was so coming back home quickly.

I geared myself up to look as bad as I was feeling...to which Miss M told me I was looking totally krappy anyway so I would be good.  We get thru triage really quickly and it's only a couple hr wait so I'm feeling pretty good about it.  The first nurse we see it my nurse from the Sunday night ER trip so she knew about all this craziness of the last 50+ days so she gets me moved up the line to be seen asap and gets me some pain meds.  10 minutes later my heart just starts pounding hard enough that you could actually see my shirt move with it.  Over the next 10 minutes I started feeling warm & nauseated...even my scalp started pounding making my eyes bounce when I shut them.  Miss M goes and tells the nurse and she comes over a few minutes later to take my vitals....which startled them....I of course just thought my heart was pounding hard.  My mistake....my heart rate was 206 and my BP 198/1?? crazy high 100's number.  Suffice it to say...I really need to get way more "edumacted" about my BP numbers.  I know my resting heart rate but no clue as to what those 2 numbers mean.  WELL...the nurse came back with a wheelchair and whipped me into the "Emergent" part of the ER in the big curtained room right in front of their nurse station and the room was instantly filled with people hooking monitors up and taking blood and extended ECG strips to see what was going on.  They tried all sorts of tricks to get my heart to back into normal rhythm and finally gave 3 injections and nothing worked....it went on for about 3 hrs before it just did this little flip thing and went back to normal.  My BP took a few more hours to really settle back (and acted up the next day again). They paged Cardiology who didn't think it was critical to be seen at 4am so they would check on me in the morning.  They eventually moved me out of that section while I waited for my bed on the surgical floor.  OH YA...they thought it might have been caused by the back flow in my chest abscess from the "new" drain still NOT working.  They tried repeatedly to get it to do something and finally decide to surgically replace it in the morning....again...