Before my trip to the ER: Easy as 123 (Part 4)

by | Dec 30, 2020 | health

Before the event that sent me to the ER in the middle of the night (read about that here), I was seeing the same number series over and over: 123.

And the night it happened, at one point I looked at the clock and there it was: 1:23AM.

I have always noticed numbers, patterns, and sequences [Full disclosure: I was in the math honor society in high school and I took Calculus in college for fun] so this was nothing new for me. For weeks, I saw 123 on clocks, on license plates, on TV … and of course I had to look up a meaning for this.

I like to go to Sacred Scribes Angel Numbers website for this. Keep reading

Before my trip to the ER (Part 3)

by | Dec 27, 2020 | family, health

The week before I woke my husband up in the middle of the night to take me to the ER, my brother and I had been comparing blood pressure readings via text, just for fun.

We would take turns texting our numbers to each other, joking about which one of us ‘won’ that round (the winner was the one with the highest numbers).

I won a LOT.

And then he had a heart attack.

As the saying goes: “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.”

He is home from the hospital now and recovering nicely, but there is nothing like a heart attack, whether your own or your brother’s, to get your attention.

When someone has a significant health event, I always think it pays to look at what you were doing leading up to it happening. What were you eating and drinking? How were you spending your time? How were you feeling overall on any given day? What supplements were you taking? Have you introduced anything new or different in the few months? After all, everything has led up to this point. What will you do differently now to create a different outcome? Keep reading

My trip to the ER, (Part 2)

by | Dec 23, 2020 | health

When I got to the ER, the irregular heart rhythm had stopped but my blood pressure was very high.

Impressively high. Higher than I have ever seen in real life.

I am an overachiever. 🙂

My question was: Why was it so high?

I was questioned and johnny’d and hooked up to monitors and IV’d and tested by the staff and hours (many, many hours) later, we had a potential answer:

Electrolyte imbalance: low potassium level.

Whew! Now that the cause was known, it could be corrected and I would be fine, right?

I was given potassium 40 mEq to take in the ER to begin to correct the imbalance. Potassium 40 mEq was delivered as two giant 20 mEq pills. I have given them to others many times but this was the first time I had to choke them down myself. The pill starts to dissolve almost as soon as you put it in your mouth, and forms a chalky mass that is no fun at all to try to swallow. At one point I had to decide whether to keep trying to get it to go down or try to regurgitate it and start over. There was a second round of this to take after I got home, but the nurse asked (thank you, thank you) for it to be dispensed as four coated 10mEq tablets (which turned out to be infinitely easier to swallow). Keep reading

My trip to the ER

by | Dec 20, 2020 | Clarity, health

I see almost never go to the doctor or to the hospital.

Until I last month, when I suddenly did.

I had been asleep for a few hours when I awoke with a pounding heart. It was a uncomfortable, but I wasn’t too worried.

At first.

I got up and went into the bathroom, shutting the door quietly so as not to wake up my husband. I put the light on and waited in vain for it to stop. The pounding continued, twice as fast as my heart should be beating. I took some deep breaths, trying to be calm, still waiting for it to stop.

It didn’t.

Eventually, I realized that I needed help. I woke up my husband.

The last time I had to wake my husband up in the middle of the night to take me to the hospital was when I was pregnant with my second child and my water broke. This occasion wasn’t anything as great as that, but my husband was every bit as heroic. Keep reading