Life in the ER or: How I spent last Thursday

Since I jumped off the cliff in the Bahamas I’ve been in varying amounts of pain. It’s usually centered in the muscles in my back and occasionally in my lower ribs. Sometime last week, maybe Tuesday, the pain started moving up my body. Strange? Yes. By Wednesday evening the pain was centered in the upper-center of my chest, pretty much right where my heart is. Even more strange? Yes. Thursday morning I called my doctor.

The nurse at the doctors office, after hearing the full story, took a minute to confer with the doc, and then came back in a fairly excited state and told me to go to the Emergency Room to get a chest x-ray and any other forms of treatment they might suggest. Not exactly how I had planed on spending my Thursday, but pain in my upper chest didn’t seem normal so I went.

After twenty minutes in triage I was in the radiology room getting the chest x-ray taken care of. While I was waiting for the ER doc to look at the films (yeah, I’ve seen an episode of ER or two) I turned on Wimbledon in my room. At this point a doctor, who wasn’t mine, came in to catch a few points. We talked for a few minutes, not about my predicament, but about tennis: the playing of tennis, the Wimbledon series, you know, really important stuff.

After a little while the doctor came in. I explained the whole story to her and she told me that pain moving around is common in skeletal injuries. Who knew? She shifted her focus to my back and told me the story, hitting the water feet first, pain in the back muscles, etc was indicative of a “compression injury,” possibly even a fracture in the vertebrate. So it was back to radiology for shots of the T-spine and L-spine.

While I was in radiology the x-ray tech was curious as to why I was there, so I told him the story I had now repeated about a million times. He told me that was a good reason to be in the ER and that he’s seen some really bad ones. He then went on to tell me he and his friends used to jump off the intercostal bridges in Fort Lauderdale. For those not familiar with the intercostal bridges in Florida, they are somewhere around 60 feet high. He said it was a lot of fun till he got really hurt one day and decided to stop doing it. I thought what I did was stupid.

About twenty minutes after the x-rays the doctor came back and told me there were no obvious breaks, fractures, or really anything else to worry about. Since it had been around a month since the “incident” there was no risk of any organ injury or anything serious and most likely the pain was from muscle swelling, deep-tissue bruising, or a “slipped disk,” which she said is for lack of a better term. She said the pain will eventually go away and if I do something that hurts my back, not to do it again for awhile. She then prescribed a “muscle relaxant” to take in case it flares up really bad and Motrin doesn’t help. I was then on my way.

When I filled the prescription later that afternoon the pharmacist was concerned at the dosage. Evidently the prescribed 1500 mg at six to eight hour intervals is the highest dosage of that particular medicine the pharmacist had ever seen. After checking her database, she decided to only give me two days worth, or 24 pills. After that whole interchange I’m a little leerily to take them at all — luckily I haven’t had too.

All in all it was probably a good thing I went to the ER to find out there wasn’t anything seriously wrong — after all, the pain had moved to my chest and got me concerned. I might have to get an MRI down the road if the pain doesn’t clear up, but I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it.

Moral of the story: don’t jump off cliffs. Yes, I know you are taught that in kindergarden but I guess I didn’t get the memo. At least it wasn’t a bridge over the intercostal.