Close Call With The Momma Last Weekend

On Friday morning I get a phone call from my mom. She was telling me that she was having severe chest pains. Breann was over at my house at the time, so we rushed over to her house. When we got to her place, I hooked my mom up to the blood pressure machine to see what her pulse and BP was at. At that moment, she had a pulse of 63 bpm. We contacted my girlfriend Michelle who works at a medical office and she spoke with the doctor. To be on the safe side, we took my mom to the emergency room.

Since it was the day after Thanksgiving, the ER was pretty busy. Normally, when a patient comes into the ER complaining of chest pain, they typically take them immediately into a room. On this day, we sat in the waiting room for about an hour. As soon as they brought her back, they performed an EKG and found that her heart rhythms were appearing to be abnormal. My mom has had some cardiac issues in the past with her murmur, but what they were telling us was something new. Since my mom was in so much pain, they gave her some narcotics to ease the pain. At the time, they thought the issue might be gall-bladder related, but didn’t want to completely ignore the cardiac symptoms.

The whole day Friday while she was in the ER was a bit frustrating for me. The doctors didn’t know what the real cause of everything. They kept telling me they were “stumped”. They performed an abdominal ultrasound and found nothing out of the ordinary with her gall-bladder. After they were basically talking about letting her go home later, suddenly things changed. I walked back into the room and the doctor was running around like a chicken with his head cut off. They wanted to rush my mom into CT to have a view of her heart. They suspected she might have a tear in her aorta and if anything was going to kill her, this would be it. Of course I was fine until I heard the whole death thing. No one mentioned anything about dying until that moment. The nurse, myself, and the ER doctor followed my mom to CT. Once the test was done and they did not see anything, I started to celebrate in the CT room. The nurse and doctor were laughing while I was hooting and hollering.

To be on the safe side, the doctors decided to admit my mom for 24 hours and have her on heart-attack watch. They basically would draw blood every hour and look for cardiac enzymes in her blood which would reflect some kind of trauma to the heart. Throughout the whole day Friday and Friday night, her labs were normal. They finally discharged my mom Saturday afternoon thinking she might have passed a clot. The clot did not harm any arteries or her heart so they felt comfortable releasing her. The discharge plans required more cardiac tests. She is supposed to have some 4-hour long nuclear study on her heart today.

Looking back on the whole experience I would have to say that we were really lucky to have the doctor and nurse we did. Throughout the whole process, the doctors kept us all up-to-date with what was going on. They were super friendly and seem genuinely concerned. During the CT scan, the doctor would walk back to the room where my mom was so he could keep Breann updated.