Eventful weekend

This past weekend was kinda eventful in multiple ways, one of which is that Christin and I got to experience the Swedish Covenant Hospital Emergency Room and also Swedish Covenant Hospital's Anderson Pavilion room 337 (bed 1). But I will return that in a bit. Friday of last week concluded with the two of us celebrating the new engagement of our friends J and L. They had a bunch of people over to L's apartment for deserts and drinks and general merriment. There was plenty of all three and C and I had a really good time talking to old friends and making some new ones. It is still kind of odd for the two of us to come into this culture of North Park University grads sometimes. Not bad, but there is a lot of history there that we were not a part of and so we find ourselves smiling and nodding at times to things we have no clue about. Luckily that only lasts for a few minutes at a time now and the awkwardness that we sometimes experience internally passes quickly. Anyway, the party was still in full swing when we made our exit around eleven thirty or midnight (which is the latest that we have stayed out in quiet awhile till that point of the weekend).

Saturday C and I slept in a little before getting ready and departing for a breakfast date on the road while we drove out to the larger of the two Ikea's in the area. It had been almost a year since our last trip and we have been doing some spring/two year cleaning of the apartment and realizing that some of the modern conveniences that Ikea carries might be beneficial toward the efforts that we were making. We wandered the three floors of that Swedish organizational wonderland for a good part of the day, enjoying the meatballs and lingonberry juice for lunch (mmmmmmm). We departed for home with the truck loaded down with a few bookcases, a couple of baskets and some decorative throw pillows. Overall a very good trip and C and I had fun dreaming of the chance to decorate our own home and not just the semi permanent structure of our apartment. Later that evening we went back to L's apartment and a few of us grilled some burgers and artichokes and such. Really good food followed by a round of playing a newer board game that RA brought, Power Grid. This game is sweet. It is a German designed game that consists of building cities on a map of either the US or Germany and purchasing/bidding on power plants to power those cities. I won. It was a fun game and lasted a few hours so another night that ran later than C and I are used to.

Sunday started out as normal with our going to church followed by our weekly trip to Target. After that was laundry time and assembly of the aforementioned bookcases. The day moved along pretty smoothly until a quarter to 8 in the evening when I started experiencing some odd things happening in my chest. My heart started fluttering. Yes, I am in love, but that was not what was causing these changes in my heart beat. The fluttering came in short bursts and they continued happening for about 15 to 20 minutes. Once they stopped, I felt a tightness in my chest that I had never experienced before. It felt like something was sitting right behind my sternum and was trying to push out. This lasted for more than an hour and that was when we decided to call our RN mom's. They encouraged me to go get it checked out, so at 10:30 pm C and I headed to SCH ER. It was amazing how quickly I was taken back to Triage when I told the front desk that I was experiencing heart palpitations followed by chest pain. Within 5 minutes of walking in they were giving me the first of a multiple EKG's. After that was done we sat in the waiting room for awhile. We eventually were brought back to the ER and I was poked, hosed, and adhered to multiple machines plus subjected to three different personnel asking the same series of questions (a med student, the resident, and the doctor). They gave me a Nitroglycerin pill which eased the tightness in my chest and then a patch with nitroglycerin on it. At 3:30 in the morning I was admitted to the hospital and taken to my new room, 337. C went home at that point because the chairs in the rooms are worse than the chairs in the ER rooms, which are pretty bad themselves, so she might as well get some sleep, or rather a nap. I think that I got all of an hour and a half worth of sleep because of the various things attached to or stuck in me. The next couple hours consisted of more questions I had already been asked and no answers from the staff about what had caused it. Eventually I was given a stress test and an echo (an ultra sound of the heart). Both of which showed nothing alarming (Grrrrr). I say that because if they had found something, at least there would be a course to take afterward. As it stands, I was discharged at 6 pm on Monday because my primary physician has the good sense to understand that a patient feels better at home instead of sitting in a hospital room while the hospital isn't really finding anything wrong. I am following up with her on Friday afternoon. So far, Sunday night stands out as the latest that C and I have been out while living in Chicago since she didn't head home till after 3:30 in the morning. Apparently that is a good time to drive on Foster cause there are very few cars on the road.

J