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The Call…
Friday morning, I received “the call”. You know, the call you don’t want to get early in the morning from an upset family member sharing bad news. This one was from my sister, crying that my mom had been admitted into the emergency room with chest pains.
And then you go straight into emergency mode. The first phone call went to work, telling them that I wouldn’t be in until I knew what was going on. Then I headed over to pick my sister up, but when I got there, realized that she’d already left—crossed wires in our communication. A little glitch in our disaster recovery plan.
Off to the freeway, during the morning commute for the half hour drive to the hospital she’d been admitted into. My mom actually works at the hospital and I later found out that she’d woken up that morning unable to breathe well, pains in her chest and a pain going down her arm. She decided to drive herself to work, “in order to be at the hospital in case anything happened”. Personally, I would have suggested a call to 9-1-1, but it didn’t happen that way.
She is the first to arrive around 6:30AM, when the entire place is still closed. And there’s a half hour between the time she arrives and the next person might arrive—if they aren’t late. Half an hour that could be the difference between having a massive heart attack and getting help. That person, a nurse, was late, but when she came in, my mom told her about the discomfort. And then things began moving quickly. A quick EKG, some medication and no change, the nurse put my mom into a wheelchair and ran her over to the emergency room for an evaluation.
When you work in a hospital, you get treatment very quickly. They certainly take care of their own and so she was put onto a bed, as people yelled, “she works here, she works here!” Some nitro pills, blood pressure, scans, the works.
By the time my sister and I arrived, the workup had all been done and since they only allow one visitor at a time, we took our turns going in to visit. The tests revealed that it wasn’t a heart attack or even heart related. She was told that she was “very healthy” and that it could be muscle related. Certain movements would send searing pains down her arm and through her chest, but it wasn’t a heart issue. No one in our family has heart issues.
Anyhow, “the call” ended up being nothing, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. I spent more than half the day at the hospital until she was released. Then I drove her home and went to work for a few hours. An eventful Friday that could have been worse than it was. And that’s a good thing.
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This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Entries, Friends and Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.