2017 May 7^th

You may have noticed that there was no Detritus last Wednesday. I was being given a ride in a large truck from my doctor’s office to the local hospital’s emergency room. Some time ago, I wrote about TIAs, Transitory Ischemic Attacks. Well, I was having another one in my physician’s office.

I had a minor skin rash, got an early morning appointment with my doctor who decided it wasn’t an existential threat and prescribed some salve. (I tried to get an appointment with my dermatologist but she was booked up through July, that’s right, through July. Aren’t we told that Canadians come to this country for medical treatment because the wait for treatment is so long in Canada? Really?)

At this point I start to say something to my doctor and it comes out halting and garbled. He stops and looks at me quizzically. I keep attempting to talk with nothing sensible is coming out of my mouth. He tells me to stay where I am, sends in his nurse and calls an ambulance. A gurney appears in his office corridor; I am hustled on it and I am off to the local hospital’s ER.

By the time we get there, I am making sense once more. Apparently, it is just a TIA and not a full-blown stroke. My ER room has two RNs and my wife who has been called by my physician. Yes the physician called her, not his office assistant or some other employee, but the physician himself. That’s impressive and that’s not easy, “Hello Mrs. Klugh. Your husband may be having a stroke here in my office. He is on his way by ambulance to the hospital ER. Perhaps you can meet him there.” That’s why this man is my physician and one of the several reasons why I am not a physician.

Now the tests begin: Even though my symptoms are clearing, the medical people must still look for the physical source of the problem. Blood is drawn; I am back on a gurney and trundled down several corridors by my nurse friends, to a machine that will do brain scans, then back to the room for an EKG.

There is an automatic device attached to my arm that takes my blood pressure every fifteen minutes. It is quite high, just above 210 over 180. The ER physician tells us that the current thinking is not to knock BP down when it gets that high because high blood pressure is the body’s way of clearing out the gunk that might have clogged things up; hey, whatever works.

Now we wait…and wait. Nothing can be decided until the results of these tests come back to the ordering ER physician. Then they do and we are told the results were all normal. On the way out we pay the hospital bill. We have insurance so all those tests and medical attention sets us back all of 90 dollars. We get a ride home from my wife’s friend and we get there by lunch time. It has been an eventful morning.