![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Complex Time Signatures
Oct. 28th, 2003 10:20 amThat damned doctor should never have mentioned strokes! In the past, whenever my heart went funny, I would just (à la Pooh), "Oh, bother!" Now, I think I'm going to keel over any minute and start drooling. I've been running around with an ECG requisition for weeks waiting for a good prolonged heart arhythmia. As I biked to work yesterday, the pattern seemed sufficiently erratic, so I detoured to the lab and ran in, convinced that it would return to normal before they got a picture of it.
The lab itself was a bizzaroland of stupidity. I entered a waiting room where three other patients sat morosely, growing moss. Seeing no reception area, I penetrated the back room and found an admin desk. The woman behind the desk did not look up. "I'm here for an ECG," I offered. Without looking at me, she said, "Take a number". I found the laminated cards behind a collection of used Starbucks containers on the desk and took lucky number 7.
When I returned to the waiting room, the moss people looked embarrassed that they hadn't coached me earlier. When the next man came in, I watched his bewilderment for only a few seconds before telling him to go next door and get a number. I patiently awaited my turn, checking my pulse for signs of returning normality, but it kept reassuringly throwing extra beats every few seconds. Suddenly, I saw a yellowed sign buried among the others on the wall instructing me to save everyone's valuable time by filling in personal data on my requisition. I had just started doing this when the woman next door called out in a cracked voice that had known too many dissapointments and expected nothing better in the future, "7!"
I stammered, "Sorry, I didn't have time to fill in the whole...." "Health card!" she barked back. She swiped my proferred health card and a sticker spewed forth instantly from the printer with exactly the information that the hidden sign had told me to fill out. She stuck it to my requisition and sent me into a deeper sanctum for the ECG.
Unable to stick two of the leads to my hairy chest, the technician hacked at me with a disposable razor. I'm still itching. I felt certain that if she didn't get a good 30 second chunk of data, we would miss the crucial information. I asked her for how many seconds she would record and she didn't seem able to answer.
Following the appointment, my heart went into a more prolonged and interesting period of arhythmia that I wish we could have captured instead. It remained thus throughout the day. I have the idea that when I checked in the middle of the night, it was back to normal but I woke up wonky again. In fact, I may be into the 26th hour of arhythmia which makes it likelier that a clot could form. No, this is not a serious threat but that damned doctor should never have mentioned STROKES!
I'll post mid-day and if I'm writing things like: "Blah, blah, blah, nothing's happening I'm so bored" or "I miss Buffy" or if I take a "Which Anaerobic Bacteria Am I" quiz, you'll know I've had a stroke.
Please call 911 at that point.
The lab itself was a bizzaroland of stupidity. I entered a waiting room where three other patients sat morosely, growing moss. Seeing no reception area, I penetrated the back room and found an admin desk. The woman behind the desk did not look up. "I'm here for an ECG," I offered. Without looking at me, she said, "Take a number". I found the laminated cards behind a collection of used Starbucks containers on the desk and took lucky number 7.
When I returned to the waiting room, the moss people looked embarrassed that they hadn't coached me earlier. When the next man came in, I watched his bewilderment for only a few seconds before telling him to go next door and get a number. I patiently awaited my turn, checking my pulse for signs of returning normality, but it kept reassuringly throwing extra beats every few seconds. Suddenly, I saw a yellowed sign buried among the others on the wall instructing me to save everyone's valuable time by filling in personal data on my requisition. I had just started doing this when the woman next door called out in a cracked voice that had known too many dissapointments and expected nothing better in the future, "7!"
I stammered, "Sorry, I didn't have time to fill in the whole...." "Health card!" she barked back. She swiped my proferred health card and a sticker spewed forth instantly from the printer with exactly the information that the hidden sign had told me to fill out. She stuck it to my requisition and sent me into a deeper sanctum for the ECG.
Unable to stick two of the leads to my hairy chest, the technician hacked at me with a disposable razor. I'm still itching. I felt certain that if she didn't get a good 30 second chunk of data, we would miss the crucial information. I asked her for how many seconds she would record and she didn't seem able to answer.
Following the appointment, my heart went into a more prolonged and interesting period of arhythmia that I wish we could have captured instead. It remained thus throughout the day. I have the idea that when I checked in the middle of the night, it was back to normal but I woke up wonky again. In fact, I may be into the 26th hour of arhythmia which makes it likelier that a clot could form. No, this is not a serious threat but that damned doctor should never have mentioned STROKES!
I'll post mid-day and if I'm writing things like: "Blah, blah, blah, nothing's happening I'm so bored" or "I miss Buffy" or if I take a "Which Anaerobic Bacteria Am I" quiz, you'll know I've had a stroke.
Please call 911 at that point.
