I couldn't resist sharing this after reading through all thirty some pages.
Hopefully, you won't much care that I'm not a med student of any sort , but I do know basic first aid and can generally tell if something can wait until morning or requires a trip to the ER.
I thought that some of you would get a kick out of these two:
This one happened about four years ago to my now husband and myself, at the time we were just dating.
I'm sure the ER staff had a bit of an eye roll at his expense, actually, I know they did because I shared it with them.
Now, the story. *ahem*
Before I start, I want to point out that we were both SOBER when this happened. No alcohol was involved, just, I think, machismo on my husband's part.
When you're out for a late night motorcycle ride with your girlfriend and take a sandy corner a bit too fast and end up in a ditch that has a nearly 60 degree incline that is covered with long, wet grass, by all means don't listen to your girlfriend when she says, "Just roll the bike into the yard that's about five feet through the tall grass that way, it's flat, we can get back onto the road and go home." (We didn't flip over, and were only going about 20 at the time so we sort of gracefully glided down into the ditch)
Also, ignore her suggestion of rolling it through the bottom of the ditch to the end of said ditch at the crossroads and getting it back up onto the road that way as there is only a short, slight incline (like that of a speed bump) that way.
PLEASE insist that you can drag a 450lb or so bike up the slippery, wet, grassy embankment and back onto the road because you "don't want to tresspass."
Insist that she's worrying too much when she says, "That's stupid, you'll throw your back out or worse, and no I'm not going to push it from behind. If you lose your grip it will FALL ON ME."
Keep trying to tug the bike out of the ditch, despite her repeatedly telling you to roll it across the flat yard and back onto the road until someone drives by, asks why you haven't listened to her, but proceeds to help you pull the bike up the wet, grassy, steep little embankment.
Swear you're all right even, and ride home without incident even though you tell her that she can't hold onto you as usual because "your chest hurts."
Ignore your girlfriend's "Maybe I should drive you to the ER, you're white as a sheet, clammy, sweaty, not really coherent, and I think you may have done more than just hurt your back." suggestion, as she's clearly a worrying mother hen and is overreacting.
Use hard, frozen meat as a "compress" on your ribs and never mind the fact that you can't do more than shallow gasping without wincing (and forget the fact that you're a two pack a day smoker so, yeah, shallow gasping probably doesn't help much). Ignore your girlfriend when she says, "It's not your asthma, your inhaler isn't going to help."
Ignore the fact that you can't barely move without passing out due to pain.
ONLY consent to letting your girlfriend drive you to the ER when she threatens to call 911 if you don't.
In the car, freak her out by drifting in and out of consciousness, muttering that you're 'cold' (when it's 90 degrees outside), and making her wonder if she's going to have to stop the car, call 911 on her cell, and make sure you don't stop breathing or pass out. Again.
Once in the ER, claim you're feeling better even though you can't remember ANY of your info to give to the poor nurse.
Forget that you have lethal or near lethal allergies to anything related to penicillin, that aspirin and its related friends make your stomach bleed rather uncontrollably, that you're allergic to whatever the hell is used in neosporin, and that ibuprofin makes your kidneys feel like they're being punched and has the added bonus of making you have bloody urine! Forget that you're a smoker and asthmatic.
Just say 'no' when the nurse asks and make your girlfriend have to jump in with that information.
Explain to the doctor who sees you that you think that your girlfriend is overreacting even though you can't clearly explain what happened other than it involved a motorcycle and that you can't move without hitting 10 on the pretty little sliding scale of smiley faces on the wall.
When the x-rays come back to show about five cracked ribs (three on the left, two on the right!), and other scans done (it's been way too long, I forget everything that was done) show several torn muscles around your chest, back and shoulders, and you're given an rx for relaxants, painkillers, and referrals to specialists and for physical therapy, smiling sheepishly and accepting the, "I told you so" from your girlfriend was appreciated though.
And yes, your girlfriend will force you to go through with it. Every appointment, and the at home exercises, she will force you to 'take it easy' and will not consider any around the house work you think you need to do as 'taking it easy' (such as, oil changes on cars, heavy yard work, tree branch pruning, fixing a leaky sink, shampooing the carpets, etc..) and years later she will never EVER let you live it down.
It's been a bit of a running joke for us.
AND just to make it fair, I may as well post one of my own dumb moves:
It takes a LOT to get me to go to just a regular doctor, and even more to get me to go to urgent care or the ER.
I have to either have something obviously broken or be quite convinced that I'm actually very, very sick or injured, and even then I may put it off for a day or two to "just wait and see."
The fact that you're so weak that you can barely move, can't speak, have trouble staying awake, can't swallow much of anything, and your throat is so swollen that it's nearly closed (and covered with white discs that sometimes come off when you cough) is no reason to see a medical professional.
It's just a sore throat, not strep.
It will pass and not spread to any other parts of your body, like your sinuses or your lungs (forget the fact that this is how your paternal grandfather DIED back in '85, though to be fair, it hit his kidneys, brain, liver and heart lining AND he was close to 70 at the time so he was much worse off than I).
It won't get so bad that when you finally do drag your sorry, pasty, fairly dehydrated, half corpse into the hospital the nurse who sees you walk in won't visibly step back then ask if you need a wheelchair, and people won't instinctively scoot away from you so as not to catch whatever plague you've got.
It won't cause the poor doctor who sees you to almost *jawdrop* and ask you how long this has been going on.
It won't cause him to "interrupt" your writing of what's been happening with, "You drove YOURSELF here?!"
He'll be happy to hear it's been almost a month and has been getting worse and worse, really!
And he'll LOVE the reasoning of, "Yeah, well, I'm not one to run to the doctor over every sniffle" in this case (keep in mind, I can't talk, so I'm WRITING responses to what he's asking me if it's not yes/no).
He'll be even HAPPIER to hear that you continued to go to work up until the point that you lost your voice, thus probably spreading strep to the entire office. YAY!
He will, however, laugh a bit when you write, "Strep? That bad? F*** plain penicillin, give me Augmentin. Liquid, please." after he tells you that it is, indeed, a very bad case of strep throat.
It had spread up into my sinuses and had made a move toward the ol' lungs. So many antibiotics and I was still laid up for a good week before I could go back to work.
!
