Hospital visit
2004-03-16 ~ 9:27 a.m.

I woke up on Saturday with a pain in my upper left chest. Kind of a nagging, insistent kind of pain whenever I took a breath. I thought that maybe I had pulled a muscle, popped a couple of Advil, and thought no more about it.

Until Sunday.

D. and I went out for breakfast, and then we went out shopping. The pain had become more severe, and had also started in my left side - right where my rib cage ended. I had taken a load of clothes into the dressing room to try on, but after 5 minutes, I came out of the room, pale and teary eyed. D. took the clothes from me and told me he was taking me to get this checked out.

I should mention that the pain was excruciating at this point. We got in the car and D. began driving towards the nearest hospital. Just over half way there, the left half of my torso seized up, and I was left with the delightful feeling of not being able to breathe. At all. I whispered this to D., and he managed to pull at least 160km/h on the highway we were on.

We got to the emergency room, and I was admitted right away. They immediately ran a cardiogram to determine if I was having a heart attack. I just about had one thinking about it! Luckily, there was nothing wrong in that department. They pumped me full of painkillers and ran some more tests on me.

After about 3 hours, the doctor came to talk to me. According to him, I didn't have any problems with my kidneys or liver, no spots or masses in my chest x-ray, and no blood clots in my lungs. I think I became paler as he rattled off this litany of tests - he reassured me that there was nothing serious going on. Apparently I had a pleurisy. Yeah, that's what I said. The hell? Apparently, it's a viral infection of the outside lining of the lungs - this lining makes the lungs stick to the chest cavity wall, and the virus makes parts of it become very inflamed. Thus the fun time trying to breathe.

So that was it. They took out the IV thingy, gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory/painkiller, told me to avoid exercise for a week (yay!) and sent me home. I spent the evening and Monday resting up and doing a South Park DVD marathon. I feel ok now, it just hurts a little when I take a deep breath.

The lingering part of this whole business is the fear. I have never, and I mean NEVER, been so afraid. Having that pain, not being able to breathe, and hearing the nurses talk about heart attacks and lung clots - I'm surprised my hair didn't turn white. It's dredged up a lot of the old fears about death and dying, and I've spent a lot of the last day and a half pondering it all over again. I'm actually toying with the idea of seeing someone - just to talk about this. I don't think I can talk to D., he just doesn't understand me. He doesn't get where I'm coming from.

Anyhoo, I'm alive and well. For now. But I can't shake this feeling that there is a clock somewhere with my name on it, and it's ticking backwards. Backwards towards the inevitable. The question that comes to mind is - how close am I to the final seconds?

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