Dear Diary,
Apparently I’m desperate for excitement. Chomping at the bit..totally unbeknownst to me.
It happened yesterday morning. I woke up feeling…off. It felt like maybe my heart was kartwheeling when I went to get my coffee. But then the feeling left me.
I walked the dogs, and the kartwheel-feeling returned, and this time it was pissed. It felt like three cue balls were rolling around in my chest. I fell on the coach and shakily called my primary. The advice nurse told me to call 911.
Lying on the couch I could hear the sound of the ambulance through the open front door. The dogs, locked in the backyard, bayed at the wailing siren. The EMTs swept into the house in their big boots and face masks, filled with confidence and calm. My EKG didn’t show arrhythmia, but it did show a super high heart rate for someone who’d been lying down for the last 10 minutes. The EMTs kindly loaded me into my car and sent us to urgent care.
We drove to urgent care and found…a careful covid gauntlet. A string of people with orange flags waved us through the underground garage to the far back corner where we stopped and talked to health care workers about the purpose for our visit.
Two nurses, wearing masks and gloves, came to the entrace of urgent care to let me in what appeared to be a locked front door. I was the only patient in the waiting room, and ultimately the only patient in the urgent care ward. The ratio of healthcare workers to patients was about 10:1, me being the one.
The first EKG showed atrial fibrillation and a relatively high heart rate (101 bpm lying down). I did bloodwork (at my bedside), took X rays, and had an IV. Two hours later, filled with saline, my EKG and heart rate snapped back to normal…and I was released!
I came home and, Silkwood style, peeled off my clothes in the laundry room and showered immediately.
It sucks to have a problem during corona lockdown–everything seems more intense. But the nurses and doctor tending to me seemed completely composed and not as afraid as I was. I think the urgent care clinic I visited had made the executive decision to divert all respiratory illness to a different location, that choice, in conjunction with the underground garage routine potentially made the staff feel relatively confident that I was not dragging in any unwanted virus. Or maybe it’s just their excellent training and professionalism.
Whatever the source, I am totally grateful for their attention.
Until tomorrow