What happened

Well, the short answer is: “I still don’t know, because they’ve put me in this room and thank goodness I have my Mac and my iPhone so I can be entertained some.” (Yes, welcome to your modern hospital, with its free wifi for guests!)

§

This morning I left the house to go to a local cafe and do some writing. I got my nonfat vanilla latte, I sat up on one of the bar stools at the marble bar, and I bent over to plug my Mac into one of the power strips they have hidden on the underside of the bar. No charge. That was annoying. I leaned over to unplug it from the strip —

Suddenly I had this pain in my left side, below my rib cage, above my hip, like I’d pulled a muscle. I thought, “That’s a weird way to pull a muscle…” But it just kept getting worse, like I’d really pulled something horrible there, and I thought, “Did I just give myself a hernia?” (I’ve never had a hernia, I know nothing about them other than they “pop out,” and whatever this muscle pull was, it felt like it was popping out.)

I sat up straight, and the muscle still cramped. So I stood up.

And I immediately started to black out.

I often get lightheaded when I stand up (ah, low blood pressure), but this time my vision actually started to go. I gripped on to the bar stool or something to keep me standing up.

A woman came over to me and said, “Are you okay?” She sat me down in a chair and told me to put my head between my knees. She asked for my name, asked me what happened, and then called someone — apparently not 911, but whoever it was dispatched paramedics to the cafe. They arrived approximately 45 seconds later. Okay, maybe not really, but seriously, they had to have been at the next cafe over they got there so fast. They set up their little high-tech monitoring station, checking my heart rate, checked my blood pressure, checked to see if my side was still hurting (it’d stopped almost as soon as I’d stood up), and since I reported I wasn’t quite at 100%, the main guy said, “Which hospital you want to go to?”

Oh, SIGH. Okay. But I want you to know I agreed to do it only because this set of paramedics had to have been cast by Hollywood: they were seriously the best-looking group of men I’ve seen in a long time and spending more time with them was not a hardship.

They stuck an oxygen tube in my nose, hefted me onto a gurney, and wheeled me out to the ambulance. I answered lots of questions over and over. I said, “This is probably easier than some of your runs, huh?” The guy sitting with me said, “Yeah, you don’t smell like feces or vomit.” They had an EMT student in the ambulance, and they asked if I minded if he practiced on me. Whee! I’m a crash-test dummy!

Wheeled me into the hospital, took my blood pressure, my heart rate, my oxygenation. Told me to pee into a cup (seriously, is there not a better version of this someone could some up with for women?). Handed me a gown. Told me to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

It’s 1:00 now, so it’s been…3 hours? I have to get the kids in another hour. The doctor (who eventually stopped by, and asked all the same questions again) said he thought it was a muscle strain…or an ovarian cyst, so we really need an ultrasound. Since I’ve recently gone up on my oblique sidebend exercise at the gym–I hold a 42.5 lb. dumbbell doing that one; fear me!–I’m rooting for muscle strain, myself. I still feel lightheaded, but I haven’t eaten since 8:30 and I usually have both a midmorning snack and lunch by this time, so I’m not sweating the lightheadedness.

Mostly this is just boring. There’s a machine outside my room that goes BOING every 10 seconds. EVERY TEN SECONDS. I had someone come in to adjust my gown because apparently I was showing too much leg and then she pulled my curtain closed…which just then opened it that much on the other side. Thank goodness I have my Mac with me, because I would be bored bored BORED without it.

And that is today’s fun.

2:12pm Update: After 3 hours here, I asked the nurse for some water. No, she said, you need an ultrasound and your bladder needs to be empty. 45 minutes later I asked again and she gave me a small cup, telling me not to drink it all.

Then the ultrasound tech came by and mentioned that my bladder needs to be full.

The nurse came in and said, Was I okay with having a catheter to FILL my bladder?

I said, No, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, kthxbai. <insert steaming angry emoticon here> So now I am drinking as much water as I possibly can. Hopefully this means I am on the fast-track (HAHAHAHAHA) to getting the hell out of here.

Final Update:
A friend got my kids at school, took them for ice cream, then took them to Club Swanky (where they practically live anyhow).

Darin came by at 3pm to stay with me, which was good, because after I drank a ton of water ultrasound wasn’t ready to see me. When they finally got me in there, the tech told me my bladder wasn’t nearly full enough (and I told her to stop pressing too hard on that particular spot, because “bladder not full” had a different truth value depending on which side of it you’re on). She managed to get the images she needed anyhow, all of which showed…nothing. No kidney problems, no ovarian cyst, nothing that they could see that would have caused that pain I’d had.

The doctor looked at all my tests and said, “No idea what happened.” Okay, he didn’t use those terms, but that was the upshot. General thought is that I did strain my oblique muscle and then cut off blood supply when I stood up too quickly.

Except for the fact that I’ve had low blood pressure my whole damn life and I know how to stand up without passing out…that sounds great. Where do I sign so I can get out of here?

We got the kids, went out to dinner, and came home.

It’s sort of frustrating that this anomalous incident is completely inexplicable, although I suppose that’s better than finding something horrible.