My Trip to the Emergency Room (pneumopericarditis)
So… Tuesday (March 4, 2008) after a South Medford Band Concert(hold the jokes). I was upstairs doing way too much homework, at 9:30pm, (try a Personal Health project, one page English poem, and studying for a Pre-Calculus test) I got tired and aggravated and had a Headache so I layed down on the couch upstairs and noticed some discomfort in my chest, like when you eat something and it gets stuck part way down, but it was a little further down. I thought nothing of it. I ended up falling asleep and waking back up around 10:30pm, I still had the pain so I went and got some Tylenol did a little homework and at about 11:00 called it quits. I woke up 2 or 3 times in the middle of the night, still in pain, and noticed that sitting upright made most of it go away, so I went back to sleep with some pillows propping me up.
At about 5:00 in the morning I woke up and was in serious pain. I sat up, walked around. Nothing was making it feel any better. It hurt bad enough that I started getting teary eyed. I can’t remember the last time I cried because the pain was so bad. Feeling helpless, I ended up going downstairs and waking my parents up. We went to Rogue Valley Medical Center, my mom pulled into the parking lot where all the “Emergency” signs were, and then she proceeded to miss the actual “Emergency” driveway. We turned around, parked and went in, went to the front desk, got asked some questions and then was taken back to ER room 12.
I had to put on one of those classic medical robe things, what a pain in the ass to put on! Especially when you can’t stand up without having a sense of helpless pain well over you. After semi getting it on, a doctor came in and took some readings and left the room. Later a nurse came in, put stickers all over me and hooked me up to a big machine that reads my nervous system activity from these separate points (the stickers.) I’m pretty sure they were checking to see if any “broken” nerves could have caused my pain (like pressure points.) After this the doctor came in and told us how a virus had been going around that sometimes causes swelling of the heart and a lot of discomfort, but they needed to take some chest x-rays to be sure. So they gave me a nice warm blanket (the only comforting thing of the morning), and wheeled me down some hallways and to a room filled with big fancy machines. They made me stand up(still in pain) and get a couple chest x-rays and then took me back to my room.
The doctor came in and told me I had a pocket of air in-between my Heart and the lining of my heart (the pericardium.) He told me that it wasn’t viral and that it is caused by pressure built up in your lungs, blowing out a piece of your lung and, the air, freakishly traveling into the lining of your heart. (Usually when your lung “blows out” like this the air travels into the chest or abdomen and dissipates after a few days.)
So he proceeded to ask “Well this is very uncommon and usually has a pretty unapparent cause... Have you been doing a lot of hard exercise or breathing hard lately?
“No, not really” I replied
He proceeded to think hard *scratching his head*
“Have you been. Um… blowing up balloons or something similar?”
I then laughed “Well I just played my trumpet in a concert last night.”
“Well that would do it!”
He explained that, normally the heart sits in the pericardium (heart lining) pretty snugly, It’s almost like a leathery case, but the inside of it is very slippery and lubricated, so the heart can move around freely. With air in-between the lining and your actual heart, the slippery “stuff” can dry out and cause a lot of friction between the two. So your heart is essential now rubbing against a piece of dried out leather, instead of some nice slippery fleshy stuff. On top of that the pericardium doesn’t stretch very much, so the air also stretched it out too far and is causing it to “bump” into other organs.
This thing has only happened to one other Rogue Valley resident in the last year (at RVMC) so it’s pretty uncommon. Me being curios as to how the x-rays turned out, asked the doctor if I could see them. Since they were digital x-rays, I had to go down the hall to a main “staff room”. It was pretty scary to see a big black hole, between my heart and the pericardium. I went back to the room to wait for the complete diagnosis. All of the staff were pretty curios as to how my heart “sounded” so a couple nurses came in to listen (I hadn’t heard it yet.) They described the crunching sound(supposed to be a normal heart beat) as “If you plugged your ears and proceeded to eat potato chips.” I was again curios and asked if I could listen, they gave me a stethoscope and sure enough it sounded all nasty and crunchy. It sounded worse as I layed down(instead of sitting upright.) In all, throughout the time I was there, 16 people on the medical staff came and listened to see what it sounded like. They were all very kind and asked if they could listen before they actually did.
They sent me home with instruction to take 3-200mg tablets of Ibuprofen every 6 hours. The air is supposed to be reabsorbed into the bloodstream, completely, in about a week. I took another x-ray today (Friday,) it is looking a lot better but a final one has to be taken at the end of next week. I rested on the couch most of that day, unable to lay down all the way because of the pain. It sucks so much, when you hurt that bad and can’t do anything about it, except wait. The only way to escape the pain is to sleep, and so I did.
In the end I got out of school for three days, I’m not allowed to do any athletic activities for at least two weeks, I can’t play trumpet for two weeks (good luck at districts Nick) and I have a butt load of homework to make up.
-but I did get to watch “3:10 to Yuma” and read a 600 page book.
*ugh* “I’m glad that’s over” Daniel
Topic: My trip to the Emergency Room (pnuemopericardium) (Read 2944 times)
