Honestly, Beautifully : honey blade

2002-07-27 - 2:18 a.m.

Ah, drama.

The last 24-odd hours have been a bit of an ordeal. It started around 1.30 - 2am yesterday morning. I sat down to watch The Evil Dead 2 and suddenly developed palpitations.

Now, I've had palpitations before but it's always been a case of a harder, more pronounced heartbeat. This time it was full-on tachycardia - not only harder but a lot faster too. When it got to around 3.30 and my pulse still wasn't slowing down, I decided to call NHS Direct. The nurse there recommended I go to hospital there and then and have an ECG, so I called a taxi and Becca and I (we were both rather more sober by now) set off for the A&E.

So we waited there for a bit, then the staff nurse called me into triage to get checked over. He took my pulse, which was 99 at this stage - dropped a bit from the 114 it had been at 3.30. After seeing if I was on any medication and so on, I went back out into the reception area and waited. Then I got called over to the cubicles.

It's a funny thing, every time I've ever had to go to A&E it's been the minor injuries department I've been ushered into. This time I got a cubicle and a bed and one of those hospital gowns that smelled musty. Becca and I waited in there for the nurse to come over and do the ECG and listened to the things going on in the cubicle next door. There was a guy in there who'd been really badly beaten, the police were there taking photos and asking him if he could remember where he lived or what his phone number was.

Eventually I got the ECG done. It was much the same as all those times I'd needed an EEG as a child, but the sucker things went all over my chest instead of my head. After she did that, the nurse left and shortly afterwards the doctor came over, looked at the chart, took my pulse and told me to lay off the caffeine.

Didn't suggest any way to stop my head from swimming or anything that might calm my pulse, mind. Grrr. That made me feel kinda stupid.

When we got back here it was about 6am and I hadn't had any sleep, so we both crawled back into bed for a couple of hours. My stomach proceeded to churn for the rest of the day and coupled with the extreme heat I had a pretty bad case of heatstroke by the time I got to work. I drank two bottles of Sprite, ate an orange ice lolly and worked my way through half a tub of Caramel Chew Chew Ben and Jerry's ice cream while cursing the incompetency of the other members of staff and struggling to retain consciousness.

My memories of work this evening feel kinda fuzzy, like a dream. The office was fucking hot and not ventilated anywhere near well enough and that only made my existing fuzziness worse.

I feel rather better now though. And I guess I should go to bed soon since Becca and I need to get up early for our Sheffield-travelling antics...

.

previous - next

.