Hospital Visit Saturday

My friends and family have heard me saying recently that I was trying to go a year without a hospital visit as it has been since 2002 when I have gone for 12 months without a visit.

I had a pretty good month in May and I was hopeful, but that hope went away on Saturday when my wife had to bring me to the emergency room because I could not catch my breath.

I had been getting shakier and shakier over the past two days for unknown reasons, and on Saturday, right after a nice lunch with my son and his wife I got into the car, and I started hyper-ventilating and just could not get my breath.

So we rushed to the emergency room and then put me on oxygen right away and started checking me out. They checked out my heart first and that checked out okay, they said, so they started doing all sorts of tests.

I was having heart attack symptoms with chest pains, and my left arm was going numb, my kidneys were not doing well and my BP was dangerously low.

Long story short, they could not find the cause, and after stabilizing me and running tests for 7 hours, they let me go home. We were impressed with the doctor, he showed us the tests and discussed the issues each step of the way.

Then the next day, the doctor actually called to see how I was doing. That has never happened before. I feel grateful that he was my attending doctor.

One last thing, this had a profound effect on my wife. She was fiercely attentive with me all weekend and would not let me do chores, etc. This seems to have had a big effect on our philosophical approach to life.

We have had a lot of side issues lately, but this was a wakeup call for us to appreciate our time together as we never know how much time we will have together. We talked about it several times.