So I made my second trip to the ER in less than a year last night. Perhaps if I keep it up, when I walk in they will all be like “Chris!”, just like on Cheers when Cliff would walk in. That would be pretty sweet, but at the same time, pretty sad if I had to go to the ER that much!
I was sitting here at my desk in the basement around 9:45 as I usually do every night and out of nowhere it was like something went off inside my leg. All of a sudden it swelled up and got all numb and weird feeling and it hurt like hell. I tried walking around and stretching to see if I could get it to stop thinking it was like a leg cramp or something. Nothing I did would make the numbness or the pain go away. I was getting to the point where I couldn’t breath right because of the pain. I’m fairly tolerable to pain, but this was just insane. My first thoughts were that I was having an Anyurism because of what happened to Ben and my Mom, and because my Mom had one in her leg at about my age. However I wasn’t getting light headed or anything like that so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on.
April called Joyce and she came right down to stay with the kids and April drove me to Aultman. I had to remind her a few times that I was still alive and breathing so that she wouldn’t be in such a hurry. The whole ride up there I couldn’t feel the front of my leg. We got there around 10:15 and registered and what not. We probably sat there for an hour and a half, meanwhile I continued to be in pretty good pain and sat there squirming around trying to keep my mind off of it. Finally they took me back and the Dr. Didn’t really see much wrong. Because of the family history, he sent me back for yet another CAT scan. I swear I’m going to glow in the dark here soon. Anyhow, the CAT scan turned up nothing and he couldn’t find anything that would explain my symptoms. He said it seemed like maybe a pinched nerve, but that wouldn’t cause my leg to swell up, so he didn’t know. He gave me morphine and something else that starts with a Z while I was waiting on the results. It helped take the edge off, but it still hurt pretty bad.
He sent me home around 2:00 AM with a prescription for vicodin. We stopped to fill it at Walgreens because I didn’t think I could sleep without it. As soon as I got home, I took it and was out pretty quickly. When I woke up I was feeling pretty good. A little bit sore but 100 times better than last night. After working all day, it is a bit sorer than when I woke up, almost like a pulled muscle, but still bearable without medication. The odd part is tonight I noticed a pretty severe bruise where the pain was in my leg. I’m not quite sure what that means, but I’m thinking I’d better make a Dr. Appt tomorrow to see what she thinks.
Speaking of Doctors, I went today to see a surgeon at Aultman because my family doctor thought I had a hernia. The ER Dr. last night didn’t think I had one, but said I should keep my appt. just to be sure. The surgeon said he couldn’t feel a hernia, so I like that I have two opinions on that one.
We are in the process of changing our family Dr. to one up at Aultman, but in the meantime I’ve seen our current Dr. for all of these other problems, so I’m starting to get to the point where I don’t know when I should stop seeing our current Dr. and start seeing the new Dr. I will probably call them tomorrow to and see what they say about switching with all this other stuff going on.