Today I had one of my rare visits to the emergency room. It started while I was talking the walk after coming home from work. After around 10 minutes, I started feeling a “ring of pain” circling both my stomach and back when I breathed in deeply. Only then, but it was quite pronounced and unlike any pattern of pain I could remember from before. Well, I turned around and started going home, but on my way home my pulse began to increase. It had been low as usual when I started, but got higher and higher and soon approached max pulse, even though I was walking leisurely. When I stopped at the supermarket, it slowed down a bit, but still too high. I called the emergency number, and they put me in contact with the emergency room here in Mandal. At this point, my pulse was lower, although still above normal, so I said I would walk over there.
I did walk there, but my pulse was in the 150s or above much of the way, which cannot possibly be a good thing when I have a resting pulse of 50. By the time I arrived, I felt pretty bad. I was shaking, my hands were icy cold, and my pulse was still racing. I waited like this for a while. Then I was let into a room and a nurse measured my blood pressure. This did not scare her, although I have no idea what the numbers meant. She took a small blood test to rule out sepsis, I think. It was fine too. This was good, I must admit that had been one of my worries. I still have that tooth abscess after all. If that emptied into the blood, bad things might happen.
After sitting for a while, I got worse again. Shaking intensified, pulse rose, despite sitting in my outer jacket with a quilt over me I was still cold. I was taken to another room where they took an EKG. This showed what I already knew, that the pulse was abnormally high, but they found no other irregularities in it. (For some reason, the palpitations only happen when my pulse is below 120. Thank goodness for that.) So my heart got a clean bill of health again. It is indeed a remarkable heart: Its resting pulse is lower and the max pulse is higher than for healthy men my age. When it doesn’t have one of its irregular days, it is the envy of the neighborhood.
The doctor was Danish. They understand Norwegian easily, since our Book Language is basically Danish with a Norwegian pronunciation. (It is a heritage from when Norway was a Danish province, up until 1814.) It is much harder for us to understand Danish. Those on the south coast have a much easier time with it, the dialect here is closer to Danish and there has been regular contact across the strait here for centuries and still is. But I had a hard time understanding her and sometimes had to shift to English. Ironically, their English pronunciation is only marginally worse than ours.
Every time we conversed, I began shaking. She thought this was because I was scared by the things we talked about, but it happened even when I did not understand her. The real explanation was probably that I could not meditate and understand Danish at the same time, and it was my meditation that kept the shivering at bay the rest of the time. I meditated continuously when not talking, although it was not a deep meditation due to the circumstances.
I was also getting a very slight fever, which increased a little eventually. Judging from this and the available data, the doctor decided it was probably the flu, which is raging around here right now. I have had the flu every few years but never had symptoms like these, but she claims it happens occasionally. Since I later got a faint headache, she may well be right.
I also asked them to measure my blood sugar. It was 7.1 mmol (the European unit of measurement, I believe it corresponds to 160 in the units of Differentland) which is well into the pre-diabetes range. That crushes my hypothesis that strange behavior of my heart comes from having lower glucose levels than it has grown accustomed to. (It was in normal human levels last summer when it last went to full speed.)
In any case, my survival several hours later implies that no internal organs have ruptured, and anything less should probably succumb to sleep, meditation and chicken soup. So I walked home when the original symptoms had disappeared. The ring of pain seems to be gone, the frost and shaking are gone, the pulse is down to about 30 beats above the normal, which is what one would expect from the body battling a virus. So I am cautiously optimistic.
I felt a bit guilty about going to the ER once I realized that it might be just the flu. But providence assuaged my guilt by letting me overhear another person contacting the ER after me. Their emergency was head lice, and they knew it. Your emergency may vary!
