The Night from HELL

Since being put on stress leave from work, Xander has been doing as ordered and chilling out.   Bailey has decided to chill out too, even though that’s all he ever does… err, when he’s not acting like a total ‘tard, I mean.

Anyhow, do you remember a while back when I foaded my body because of the horrible heartburn I had the night before?

Well… that was nothing.

Last night I went to bed at about 11:30pm, at 1:30am I woke up with chest pains AGAIN.  I got out of bed and went to take a painkiller to see if that would cause it to ease up a bit but no luck.   It got worse and worse until I was walking around the house not knowing if I was going to faint or vomit.   I was shakey and sweaty and was in so much pain I was sure I was going to die.   I’ve been woken up by chest pains about 10 times in the last 6 months or so but it was never this bad.

I got Xander out of bed and asked him to take me to the hospital.   As it turns out, hospitals don’t really deal with emergency patients like back home.  Here they have something called the huisartsenpost where doctors are in the night time to deal with patients.  So we went there.

When we went in they asked if we called ahead and made an appointment. Uhh no when you feel like you are gonna die you are just worried about getting there.   After asking a ton of questions while I clung to the desk trying not to keel over, they told me to sit in the waiting room.

There was us, an older couple, a late 40-ish woman and three other people with some little girl.   I could barely breathe, I was sweating even though I was freezing cold… and they were all sitting there staring at me!   Not just staring but staring and not even trying to hide it.   It’s bad enough feeling like I felt without sitting there with strangers watching it all.  I told Xander that I couldn’t sit there any longer so he went and told the receptionist chick and she put me in a room by myself where I could pant, sweat and whine in peace.

After about 20 minutes the doctor showed up and did all his doctory stuff.  At first he thought it might be my gall bladder that was causing the problem but after laying me down and shoving his fingers into my stomach in loads of places, he determined that it wasn’t the problem.  The pain was concentrated right under my breastbone in the center and wasn’t off to any side like they kept asking me.

He gave me two sets of pills and sent me on my way.   One to reduce the production of stomach acid and some suppositories that were loaded with codeine for the pain.  

I have never been so anxious to get home and shove something up my ass.

The pain hung on until almost 10am, which was over 8 hours from when I first woke up.  I had stayed up the entire night clutching my chest, whining, hunching over and squirming to try to find a comfortable position.   Thank god I’d downloaded an entire season of McLeod’s Daughters the other day, because it gave me a little bit of distraction for all those hours.

We spoke to my regular doctor at lunch time and he said that he spoke to the doctor from the huisartsenpost and they figure that the valve between my stomach and my esophagus isn’t working properly.  This is what is causing the chest pains to always start at the same time, about 2 hours after I go to bed.  When I lay down the stomach acid is being pushed up into my esophagus and that is what’s causing the pain.

I now have pills to take every night before bed for the next 30 days, and if it persists I will have to go have the light down the throat thing.

Xander was wonderful, even though this was all the last thing he needed right now.   He stayed up all night with me and at about 5:30am when he was getting really tired, he refused to go to bed and instead curled up on the sofa where I could easily get him if I needed him.  He took such good care of me… 

By 7pm this evening my boys were falling asleep. It’s been such a long night/day with so little sleep for us both and Xander was exhausted after nursing me all night last night and all day today.

Leave it to me to get chest pains of death and need hospital trips just when he needs things to be relaxing.  It didn’t stop him from being there though… which is one of the many thousands of things I love about him.