I went to the ER and all I got for you was this newsletter post.
Buckle up, this is a long one.
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I woke up on Thursday with a headache like someone had hit the top of my head with a hammer. This is, to me, the kind of headache that announces “You need coffee,” so, obedient slave to my body that I am, I made my way downstairs and drank the coffee that Scott had kindly made. Not all of it! For I am especially sensitive to caffeine—a delicate flower who seems to require the substance but can’t drink more than a couple of cups of coffee or tea, lest my anxiety and palpitations run amok.
Exactly 1.5 cups later, I was appropriately jittery but exactly as in pain as when I began—and now the headache was accompanied by nausea and an increasing need to be horizontal. By 2pm I had consumed gallons of water, and had taken every painkiller that we own. Nothing improved, so I curled up in bed, petting Hazel, too caffeinated to be asleep but too miserable to do anything. Hours later, after attempting to dinner, I went to bed at 9pm, fully expecting to feel better the next day.
I woke up Friday thinking, “Ah, much better,” and then moved around for exactly five minutes before the headache and nausea returned at full force. I complained to Scott and then to Abby and Deanna. Deanna said the correct thing, which was “Poor bunny, I pet your head,” while Abby was rudely like, “Why aren’t you calling your doctor?” Which of course I ignored. For a while. By noon I had to admit that maybe she had a point, so I set up a tele-health appointment. After talking to a nurse for three minutes and answering all the regular questions—no, I didn’t hit my head; no, I haven’t had migraines before—I was instructed to head right to the nearest emergency room.
Well. This, I did not expect. I pleaded with her for a bit—”I thought maybe you just had some excellent painkiller I could get ahold of?”—but she was insistent. So Scott bundled me into the car and we headed off for the closest emergency room, which happens to be in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie’s a pretty rough town, which we knew, but what we didn’t know is that the hospital we were going to is also a detox facility. This is foreshadowing!
The ER waiting area was small and crowded and the TV was blaring a true-crime show. Scott— a TV editor who is still haunted by the true-crime shows he’s worked on in the past—proceeded to have flashbacks, while I sat very still and quiet and tried to disappear into my Mind Palace. This turned to be quite difficult, because everyone around us was suffering a crisis, loudly. If one person wasn’t telling their friend (on speakerphone, natch) about their crisis, someone else was shouting at the intake receptionist about their crisis. One guy had his spiritual counselor (on speakerphone) praying for him. Another woman was (loudly) using her phone to watch footage of Kamala Harris being overly chipper and quite noisy about something.
“Maybe you should go get some fresh air?” Scott suggested, so I did, but the outside was equally loud, with various people with lung conditions smoking cigarettes and yelling to each other. Oh god and the coughing. We have so much COVID now. (We were masked, but pretty much every coughing person was not.)
At one point an extremely sick woman who nonetheless had a voice that carried shouted at a young woman, “You can’t vape! What the hell are you doing?” And the young woman—who had been trying to get her boyfriend in for detox and who was very agitated—was all “Don’t you tell me what to do, bitch” and amazingly from that point they did not quickly reach an amicable agreement. Instead, they each began shouting and all the security guards and nurses came out to see what all the hubbub was. “You can’t vape in here,” they all agreed, and the young woman burst into tears and said “I didn’t even know I was doing it, it came natural,” and they were like “Well, hmm, don’t do it again, young lady,” and everyone calmed down and went back to their assigned spots and I was like, thank goodness that’s over.
Then the loud-voiced sick woman muttered, “What were you thinking, vaping in here” and the young woman was like “I said it came NATURAL” and that would have been the end of it, except that after a short lull the young woman gained some sort of superhuman level of energy and she Tasmanian-Deviled over to the sick woman and began shrieking and frothing and the sick woman was barking and coughing and every security person came back in, like, whoawhoawhoa, AGAIN? But you seemed so even-tempered!
So the sick woman was moved around the corner to the hallway, where they gave her a bucket because she announced that all the coughing was going to make her vomit (fair), but they still were not admitting anyone because they had no rooms. At this point we had been there, I want to say, four days? But it was actually a couple of hours.
A few hours later my name was called and we went into a small room where they took my blood and I was like, “I’m pretty sure this is all from a new med I’m on?” and everyone scoffed at that! Scoffed! And then they sent me back to the waiting room for another few hours, while more stuff happened with and to people who were in a bad way. It was a lot more of the same level of drama, is what I’m saying.
Anyway eventually they took me in for realsies, only there were still no rooms so I was in a hallway in a reclining chair, directly in front of the woman with the bucket and the—I cannot emphasize this enough—impressively resonant voice, despite her level of sickness. The nurse was telling her that she couldn’t have COVID because people with COVID these days don’t get as sick as she was, which didn’t seem right to me, but I was not in a position to argue.
A nice young man came with a wheelchair and they took me to get a CT scan. Minutes later I was back in the hallway. Meanwhile, the sick woman had just been given a shot, which was apparently a new level of pain that no human had yet experienced, because she was incredibly upset, and I wanted to be sympathetic but my head hurt so much and I wondered why she couldn’t, you know, sob a little more quietly. Another patient, a gentle giant with no shoes, went over and hugged her, and I was like, that guy’s a saint and I am the devil himself.
Anyhoozle, Scott and I sat there for a while longer and then a doctor? A nurse? A person came over and asked to talk to me “somewhere private.” We walked around the corner. I naturally assumed she was going to ask, “Are you sure you didn’t get this headache from your husband bopping you on top of the head?” but instead she pulled out her phone and said, “So we found a slight abnormality in your CAT scan.”
And then she looked down at her phone and stared at it for a solid five seconds. This is a very long time to wait after someone’s just said to you, “your brain’s all funny.”
Then she looked up and said, “I’m sorry.” Like she couldn’t remember what we were talking about.
“My brain?”
“Sorry,” she said again, “my husband just sent me a disturbing picture–our horse is injured. I won’t show you the picture.” She paused. “Unless… you want to see it?”
“I really do not,” I said. “Can we get back to the brain talk?”
“Oh yes! You have low-lying cerebellar tonsils,” she said. “It could be congenital? I’m not sure yet.” She then started scrolling on her phone again. “I want to show you a picture,” she said, “of what I’m talking about. Not that one, though. Oh definitely not that. Oof not that. Don’t google this,” she said, looking up. Hahaha, I wanted to say, I will be googling the absolute shit out of this. Facebook and Instagram will be serving me cerebellar tonsil ads. “Did you know your brain has tonsils?!” the ads will declare.
She eventually found me a picture that met with her approval, which basically showed that there was a part of my brain protruding into the spinal canal. But, she said, it should have caused problems before. Which, as far as I’m concerned, it had not. My brain had performed admirably, under the circumstances!
She then stared at me so intently, you would have thought I was her injured horse. “I want to do more tests,” she said, finally. “And put you on an IV.”
So it was back in the reclining chair for me, and they took all of my blood and some of my urine and set up the IV to give me a pain reliever (THANK you) and an anti-nausea drug, which, they said, would make me feel “a little loopy.” I was ready for that.
A few minutes later my head pain was gone (hallelujah) but I started to have a new and disturbing symptom, which is that every few seconds, I developed an uncontrollable urge to kick my legs out as hard as I could, and if I didn’t, they would pretty much just flail around of their own accord. “Oh no,” I said to Scott, “I got the jimmy leg. I got the jimmy leg real bad.”
I asked the nurse, “Can this medication give you restless leg?” and she said, “Oh, yeah, it can definitely make you twitchy.”
You said loopy! Loopy! Not twitchy!
So look, I’m not going to drag this on much longer, but I spent the next couple of hours, a-twitchin’ and flailin’ and being like “this isn’t fun anymore” and finally the horse owner came back and said “Your tests were all spectacular, we think the brain thing is normal, don’t think about the brain thing anymore, there’s no brain thing, we were only kidding.” And then it was like another hour before they discharged me, and I was officially Done With All of It by then.
They finally gave me my discharge papers, which declared that my diagnosis was “headache” and “nausea.” Nine hours later, we were heading home. I twitched the entire way back.
Anyway, I have a headache again, but I’m going to ignore it, like I should done in the first place, Abby.
"So look, I’m not going to drag this on much longer..." I did NOT want your pain and anguish and twitchiness to drag out any longer, but I DID want that story to. My goodness...what an adventure. It was all at once so funny (your writing, not your pain) and so sad (society/the "system"). I am certainly glad you have no brain tonsils...or at least not concerning ones.
SHOUTING: I take a calcium-magnesium supplement when I get the jimmy leg, not that you asked!