"Are you sweating, sir?" asked one of the people wheeling me in.
"Ah, my wet hair? I'm sorry, but I took a last-minute shower before coming here, so there is no way to determine whether I am perspiring or not. I did puke from the pain, though."
The ER folks are always up for some jibber-jabber, but they were handling a crisis here, so they got their ECG thing out. That's ElectroCardioGram to you idiots and not Ecto-Containment Graph or whatever.
They clamped my feet and had these weird suction cups on my chest. I felt like I was being tested by some Dharma Initiative instrument.
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| Artist dramatization of an ECG reading |
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| Actual ECG reading in progress |
So the ECG confirmed it - I was having a heart attack. An extensive one. Oh my.
A cardiologist - Dr S - was summoned to the scene, and she was a vision of beauty. She looked like Nurul Izzah, but prettier and, well, a doctor and not a professional liar.
These are feelings of love and infatuation that only a Japanese love song can express:
I was immediately smitten and what a nice story to tell people if I met my girlfriend - a DOCTOR, honey - at the emergency room, experiencing huge amounts of pain, fighting for my life.
Oh, which reminds me.
I was at the emergency room, experiencing huge amounts of pain, fighting for my life.
Dr S, the cardiologist, decided on a treatment of thrombolytic agent to be administered with ISO - umm, let's just be fair to the idiots out there who can't even Google. They stuck some stuff into me that would dissolve the blockages in the arteries as well as some things to soften the walls of the blood vessels and of course - my favourite medical thing: mighty morphine pain-killers.
I was really insecure about the morphine because I was duped before and injected with a placebo by a doctor who thought he was being cute. I never went to his multi-million dollar scam center ever again.
But the injections were pure, legit morphine. And soon, I was quite high and the pain in my chest became a bit more manageable, with sudden bursts of unbearable torment now and then.
After the thrombolytic agent were finished (they gave me two rather large syringes of the stuff), the pain was gone and I felt ready to continue my life of pornography and literary criticism. Unfortunately, I was to be held back for observation at the Critical care Unit. Because the risk of getting another cardiac arrest is high after the first 72 hours.
I didn't manage to thank everyone at the ER. There was the nameless Gurney Boy, Dr Sg who asked me for my next of kin's number, Dr A who injected the morphine, the spectacular ER nurse F who noticed backflow due to my high BP and did some tubing magic.
I am also not sure, it might be just a painful hallucination, but there was perhaps an incessant, short, effeminate person who asked me to rate my pain from 1-10 without specifying 10 being the worst pain imaginable or the worst pain I've ever experienced.
"So which is it?" I asked. "Cause I can imagine other pains being more intense, but I have never experienced something as bad as this."
"Yes" was the answer from the strange man.
"Nine," was my final word on that to the strange creature.
And of course. Dr S. Had we met under different circumstances - oh what could have been. I'm still up for any non-caffeinated drinks, but I'm sure she's busy saving lives everywhere.
Anyway, I soon found myself at the CCU around 7pm++.
To be continued...
