Trust your instincs, you know more than you think you do.

[margaretc]

This morning, we all (Mom, me, Nate, A. and his mom) met up for bagels, and we were all sitting around chatting and playing with Nate when my mom started coughing and acting like she was in some distress. She took a nitroglycerin pill, which is of course for heart problems, and appeared to get better. So we kept playing and chatting, and after a while Mom started coughing again, and took another nitro. That's when I decided that it was time to go find a doctor. I called the Urgent Care clinic, and they told me that they couldn't take a known heart patient in distress, and to call 911. Well, I didn't, but we did go straight to the ER. On the way there, Mom had another, much more severe, attack of whatever it was, so I called 911 then and told them we were on our way to the ER. We were whisked in to Triage, where they did an EKG on her and decided she wasn't actually having a heart attack then and there, and in a room within an hour (in the ER). They've more or less ruled out heart attack, but are worried about a possible pulmonary embolism. She has contradictory symptoms and her history doesn't correlate with her present symptoms. So they are keeping her overnight for observation in something called the Clinical Evaluation Unit. It is basically a regular hospital room within the Emergency department, where they've got monitors all over and teams of nurses checking on her all the time. Between fainting yesterday (from pain, she says), and the odd nature of these attacks, the ER docs are mystified... She's going to have a cardiac stress test tomorrow, and something else to rule out an embolism (one bloodtest was borderline). My brother showed up after a couple of hours (he was dropping my Dad off at his conference in Raleigh), and he's very much shaken up. He had gone to get her last night for dinner, and he and she had decided to come to dinner instead of worrying very much about the fact that she had fainted.
So she's spending the night in the hospital, and it turned out on the whole to be good that I had visited there as a patient just a couple of months ago, because I knew where everything was and how to get in and out from the lobby, and so on. Having my university ID badge didn't hurt either, as it helped me get through the doors a bit more easily.