Sunday night Mike and I were watching some tv with all the kiddos in bed. A quiet Sunday night around 9 quickly turned quite exciting. Mike started having this weird feeling that soon turned into wheezing and chest pain and difficulty breathing. At this point I'm completely frieking out. He's literally rolling on the bathroom floor unable to really talk. When his hands, feet and face start changing colors, I tell him to get in the car, and call Ana to come stay with kids. (a lady in our ward, across the street that has been a huge blessing in our life. My kids consider her almost another grandma). We are walking out to the car as Ana walked up and Mike collapsed in our front yard. She called 911...blah blah blah. My favorite part was when the paramedic tells the pregnant woman to keep her emotions in check. Ha! They got him able to breathe and hooked him up to all sorts of things. Not a panic attack they said. His heart rate and EKG looked great, but for heart attack symptoms, to the hospital he must go. He was able to tell me just as they were closing the doors, "I feel just fine now." So while I knew he felt fine and was in good hands, still following behind an ambulance watching your husbands face the entire time is enough to make any wife an emotional mess, add pregnancy hormones on top....yeah, well..... :)
We made it to the ER and he was laughing and joking and talkin up a storm with the paramedics. They started running tests, X-Ray, ultrasounds, etc. The waiting had just begun. They have these awesome chairs that have just enough hint of padding to pretend to be comfortable chairs. Some of our great friends came and gave him a blessing and stayed and visited for a bit. The nurse said, he would probably be there for the night. I called Ana, she was planning on spending the night and taking care of kids the next day. HUGE relief! I could be with Mike and not have the extra stress of trying to juggle kids. I pulled up another uncomfortable chair, got a couple of blankets and we settled in for lots of boredom. He had a total of 4 more "episodes" with the last one ending around 2 am. Everything kept coming back as normal. While that's great and all that he really is healthy as a horse, it doesn't tell us a dang thing about why he was about to die in my yard. They took us to a room around 3am saying they needed to do some fasting tests in the morning. We "slept" the rest of the night. I ran home around 8 am to check on kids and Ana. She was good with the kids for the day. Some of the youth in our ward down the street that love to play with the kids wanted to come play for a few hours to give Ana a break. Kids taken care of for the entire day. Another HUGE relief!
One of the doctors screwed up the order of the testing to the point Mike had to stay ANOTHER night for a stress test in the morning. They had to make 100% sure his heart was fine to discharge him, even though we were pretty sure we knew what it was. At this point, he felt completely fine! He was bored and frustrated he had to stick around longer. He told me he wanted me to go home and be with the kids, I was "useless here." Gee thanks. :) I got home just after Ana had fed them dinner. (She had also done dishes, cleaned some of the house, and done some laundry!) I ate and took the kids to the hospital to visit dad. They were so good! After all, who doesn't love to ride the bed?! Haha! I took them home in time to put them to bed and for me not sleep much that night. I had a slow morning Tuesday morning with the kids while he got his stress test done. A friend took the kids at her house for some play time for a few hours. I headed to the hospital to hang out. Still wouldn't discharge him this time due to elevated blood levels of something. If they went down, he could go home, so take more blood and wait. I went back and picked up kids (and this woman, while watching all 3 of my kids on top of hers, also made us dinner) and took the kids back to the hospital to visit dad again this time with McD's ice cream for everyone. While everyone was there the dr came to discharge him. YAY!!! We all got to come home together Tuesday night right after dinner.
Tuesday night another friend showed up at my house to do dishes and clean up my house a little.
It was a stressful few days for me feeling stretched thin. Needing to give kids attention, but wanting to be with Mike, "just in case something happens." Today I'm tired and my pregnant body is feeling the effects of stress. I'm taking an easy day with the kids and just enjoying being home!!!! And Mike went back to work today.
I'm so grateful for a great ward here to help us with everything. I had so many babysitting and food offers! I was overwhelmed with the amount of service offered and rendered to our family. Medically as well, the benefits of a healthy lifestyle are evident in all of these tests they ran. The blessings of the Gospel far surpass the spiritual!!!!!
3 comments:
WOWZA!!!! So glad that all is well. I guess they don't know what caused the spasms? Praying that they "just go away"....
so glad everything is okay! I would love to talk to you, but know you must be exhausted. So just give me a call when you are feeling up to it. I love you!!!
I'm glad he's all right!
I actually have an esophageal disease, and I have a lot of the systems that you described Mike having. Spasms, difficulty breathing, heart-attack-like pain. What I have is called Eosinophilic Esophagitis, and I would strongly recommend getting Mike tested for it. It's caused by allergies, and causes a certain type of white blood cell (eosinophils) to inflame the esophagus, causing all those systems (and more - my most common symptom is difficulty swallowing, and my biggest/worst system is choking).
I've written a couple times about it on my blog - here's one post about it: http://jocelynandjason.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-throat-is-trying-to-kill-me.html.
How they diagnosed me was this: first I saw a bunch of doctors in high school, in California. They told me nothing, basically. They said it was probably acid reflux, and gave me some medicine that helped with some of the symptoms but not all of them. They also did a barium swallow, of which the results were normal.
When I got up to BYU I talked to a doctor at the BYU student health center, and he sent me to a gastroenterologist. The gastroenterologist did an EGD on my throat, and a biopsy of my throat tissue. Both how my throat looked and the elevated levels of eosinophils in the biopsy confirmed that I had eosinophilic esophagitis.
Again, I would strongly recommend getting Mike tested for it. Some doctors might be reluctant to test for it, because they think it's "rare" (it's only been discovered in the last 10-15 years), but it's actually turning out to be a lot more common than thought. My gastroenterologist said that when he was in med school, the instructors told him and the other students that they would practically NEVER see a case of it, and yet he sees a new case every week. After I found out I had it, my dad (who had been for the last thirty years that he had acid reflux) basically had to force the doctor to test him for it - and he had it.
Anyway, this is a SUPER long comment, but as what you described sounds extremely similar to the condition I've lived with for the last seven years, I HAD to comment.
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