A visit to the Emergency Room...
Feb. 6th, 2011 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha woke up this morning with severe abdominal pains, and when I asked her if she wanted to go to the ER, she said we should go without any hesitation. When that, I know the pain has to be nigh unto crippling for her, because she has a pain tolerance a mile high.
We arrived to find the place deserted. By the time I'd parked the car they'd gone through initial intake. I arrived just in time to hear, "Do you take any drugs? Does anyone hit you or hurt you?" I know, they have to ask those questions. I held my tongue rather than say, "Sigh Not recently. Does consensual sadomasochism count, anyway?"
The old lobby was straight out of the 70s, but the hospital had recently undergone a refit and the ER lobby was in that beautiful 21st-century woodtone paneling. Even better, the old ER, last visited when Kouryou-chan put a bead up her nose five years ago, was a cramped narrow set of hallways that branched without much rhyme or reason. The new ER was beautiful: A big open rectangle with four semi-private bays along each wall, and in the center a ringed command center with a glassed-in quiet area for physicians and staff. It was a heck of an admirable design.
I hepled Omaha get dressed before the nurse finally asked, "Are you her husband." Uh, yeah. They took samples from Omaha, then gave her a steroid, a muscle relaxer, and an opiate. She rested while we waited. They wheeled her over to an unspecified scanner, then wheeled her back. There wasn't much to do, I'm glad I brought a book.
While I was there, though, there was a voice screaming from down the hall. And while it wasn't a pleasant screaming, it didn't sound right to me. It sounded... practiced. Hollywood. It was the kind of sound you hear in B-movies as the zombies gnaw into a victim's intestines. Later, as I was waiting for Omaha to come back from the scanner, I heard the doctor talking to a nurse, and they were pointing in the direction the screaming had been coming from: a second section of ER, set off from the first. From the snippets of conversation I got, the screamer had been in the ER before, complaining of severe hip pain and barking like a dog. The physician said he suspected the guy was just here to score some free drugs. Later, I saw police officers roaming that hallway.
The final diagnosis was of a relatively small kidney stone that had gotten trapped at the end of the ureter, and would pass on its own in a matter of days, or so he said. A long list of long-genericized drugs was prescribed: an opiate, a steroidal anti-inflammatory, a smooth muscle relaxer, and an antibiotic in case the stone was struvite, which indicates an infection.
We got home four hours later. Omaha went straight to bed and I ran to the pharmacy to get her meds. She's sleeping now, and doing all right. I need coffee.
We arrived to find the place deserted. By the time I'd parked the car they'd gone through initial intake. I arrived just in time to hear, "Do you take any drugs? Does anyone hit you or hurt you?" I know, they have to ask those questions. I held my tongue rather than say, "Sigh Not recently. Does consensual sadomasochism count, anyway?"
The old lobby was straight out of the 70s, but the hospital had recently undergone a refit and the ER lobby was in that beautiful 21st-century woodtone paneling. Even better, the old ER, last visited when Kouryou-chan put a bead up her nose five years ago, was a cramped narrow set of hallways that branched without much rhyme or reason. The new ER was beautiful: A big open rectangle with four semi-private bays along each wall, and in the center a ringed command center with a glassed-in quiet area for physicians and staff. It was a heck of an admirable design.
I hepled Omaha get dressed before the nurse finally asked, "Are you her husband." Uh, yeah. They took samples from Omaha, then gave her a steroid, a muscle relaxer, and an opiate. She rested while we waited. They wheeled her over to an unspecified scanner, then wheeled her back. There wasn't much to do, I'm glad I brought a book.
While I was there, though, there was a voice screaming from down the hall. And while it wasn't a pleasant screaming, it didn't sound right to me. It sounded... practiced. Hollywood. It was the kind of sound you hear in B-movies as the zombies gnaw into a victim's intestines. Later, as I was waiting for Omaha to come back from the scanner, I heard the doctor talking to a nurse, and they were pointing in the direction the screaming had been coming from: a second section of ER, set off from the first. From the snippets of conversation I got, the screamer had been in the ER before, complaining of severe hip pain and barking like a dog. The physician said he suspected the guy was just here to score some free drugs. Later, I saw police officers roaming that hallway.
The final diagnosis was of a relatively small kidney stone that had gotten trapped at the end of the ureter, and would pass on its own in a matter of days, or so he said. A long list of long-genericized drugs was prescribed: an opiate, a steroidal anti-inflammatory, a smooth muscle relaxer, and an antibiotic in case the stone was struvite, which indicates an infection.
We got home four hours later. Omaha went straight to bed and I ran to the pharmacy to get her meds. She's sleeping now, and doing all right. I need coffee.
