Vogon had a seizure (the BSG rerun on at the time was irrelevant but funny).
Longer version of last night/this morning's Tweets:
Around 2140 Friday evening, Vogon was sitting on the couch half-asleep in front of BSG reruns when I heard what sounded like him sucking in his breath funny. As I turned to look at him his arms pulled up tense across his chest followed by over half a minute of clonic jerking. I immediately turned him to recovery position and barked at Laurel to get me the phone. I was on the phone with a Dallas 911 dispatcher while he was still jerking. He was alert almost immediately afterward but failed at orientation questions. The paramedics arrived a few minutes later and he didn't register them coming in, acting surprised after one of them checked his glucose and he seemed to suddenly notice that there were two people he did not know standing in the living room looking at and talking to him.
He initially declined transport to the hospital and denied possibly having a seizure, but he agreed to go after I invoked our basic rule of when to seek medical care ("we do not f*ck around with head injuries"). The paramedics got him onto a transport chair while I got his wallet and keys, and we accompanied him in the ambulance to Presbyterian Hospital Plano.
In the ER he got an initial exam (he knew his name, who I was and that he was in the hospital, but had no memory of the ambulance ride, seizure or what day of the week it was) and sent off to a CT scan. While he was off doing that, the ER doc came in and asked for a recap of what happened. He reassured me that the initial failed orientation questions were probably due to his postictal state at the time.
He took a bag of fluids right off the bat and complained of nausea partway through, so with his second bag he got a dose of Zofran. His color improved greatly and the bloodwork came back with very low potassium, so he got an IV bag of it and two tabs to take orally in the next hour. After the baseline ECG, the darling thing blared with alarms every ten minutes or so for the next hour. He took a sip of the water and couldn't keep that down, so the potassium tablets were scrapped. He was not thrilled with that, since he said it caused burning pain up and down his arm.
The next time the doctor looked in on him, his sats were low so he ordered supplemental oxygen, a second dose of Zofran to chase the puking and a dose of Ativan since he was shaking (he said shivering from cold) throughout the drip. At some point after that a banana bag was piggybacked onto the potassium drip and the ECG blare frequency dropped to 15 minutes, 20 minutes and eventually 30. Laurel slept on a pair of visitor chairs in the room nearly the whole time, leaving me alternately standing or sitting on the floor.
Eventually it was decided to move him up to to the CCU for observation and continued potassium via IV, leaving Laurel and I in the waiting room there while he got set up. She quickly nodded off in the recliner seat with the blanket and makeshift pillow (rolled-up blanket) she had used in the ER as Ratatouille played on the waiting room TV and I wrapped up in my sweatjacket as I got cold; a LVN that I had seen out of the corner of my eye passing back and forth stopped and asked if we'd like fresh blankets and insisted at least I take one, at which point I briefly nodded off in the room's other recliner until I heard the nurse assigned to Vogon's room come out. She kept an eye on Laurel while I popped in to give him his jacket and copies of paperwork from the ER, let him know if I came back for visitor hours it'd only be if I swung a ride (cabbing it is about $11 each way for one person) and otherwise to just keep me apprised of the situation so I could arrange for his ride home once he's released.
I called the cab company before coming downstairs and through some random glitch, did not promptly have a driver sent our way, so when I called back an hour later to check on their status, the dispatcher I talked to apologized and said to give her five minutes to get someone heading my way. After I hung up with her, a driver called and said he'd be there in ten minutes. He was there in less and was nothing but wonderful (he even asked Laurel if she'd like to listen to Radio Disney, winning her over). We got in at a few minutes after six, let the cat out of the bedroom, fed Laurel breakfast and now I'm going to nap for a bit before calling his parents to let them know what's going on and rest yet more before even thinking about visitor hours, because as I'm writing this, I have been awake for 25 hours less the brief nap in the CCU waiting room.
Around 2140 Friday evening, Vogon was sitting on the couch half-asleep in front of BSG reruns when I heard what sounded like him sucking in his breath funny. As I turned to look at him his arms pulled up tense across his chest followed by over half a minute of clonic jerking. I immediately turned him to recovery position and barked at Laurel to get me the phone. I was on the phone with a Dallas 911 dispatcher while he was still jerking. He was alert almost immediately afterward but failed at orientation questions. The paramedics arrived a few minutes later and he didn't register them coming in, acting surprised after one of them checked his glucose and he seemed to suddenly notice that there were two people he did not know standing in the living room looking at and talking to him.
He initially declined transport to the hospital and denied possibly having a seizure, but he agreed to go after I invoked our basic rule of when to seek medical care ("we do not f*ck around with head injuries"). The paramedics got him onto a transport chair while I got his wallet and keys, and we accompanied him in the ambulance to Presbyterian Hospital Plano.
In the ER he got an initial exam (he knew his name, who I was and that he was in the hospital, but had no memory of the ambulance ride, seizure or what day of the week it was) and sent off to a CT scan. While he was off doing that, the ER doc came in and asked for a recap of what happened. He reassured me that the initial failed orientation questions were probably due to his postictal state at the time.
He took a bag of fluids right off the bat and complained of nausea partway through, so with his second bag he got a dose of Zofran. His color improved greatly and the bloodwork came back with very low potassium, so he got an IV bag of it and two tabs to take orally in the next hour. After the baseline ECG, the darling thing blared with alarms every ten minutes or so for the next hour. He took a sip of the water and couldn't keep that down, so the potassium tablets were scrapped. He was not thrilled with that, since he said it caused burning pain up and down his arm.
The next time the doctor looked in on him, his sats were low so he ordered supplemental oxygen, a second dose of Zofran to chase the puking and a dose of Ativan since he was shaking (he said shivering from cold) throughout the drip. At some point after that a banana bag was piggybacked onto the potassium drip and the ECG blare frequency dropped to 15 minutes, 20 minutes and eventually 30. Laurel slept on a pair of visitor chairs in the room nearly the whole time, leaving me alternately standing or sitting on the floor.
Eventually it was decided to move him up to to the CCU for observation and continued potassium via IV, leaving Laurel and I in the waiting room there while he got set up. She quickly nodded off in the recliner seat with the blanket and makeshift pillow (rolled-up blanket) she had used in the ER as Ratatouille played on the waiting room TV and I wrapped up in my sweatjacket as I got cold; a LVN that I had seen out of the corner of my eye passing back and forth stopped and asked if we'd like fresh blankets and insisted at least I take one, at which point I briefly nodded off in the room's other recliner until I heard the nurse assigned to Vogon's room come out. She kept an eye on Laurel while I popped in to give him his jacket and copies of paperwork from the ER, let him know if I came back for visitor hours it'd only be if I swung a ride (cabbing it is about $11 each way for one person) and otherwise to just keep me apprised of the situation so I could arrange for his ride home once he's released.
I called the cab company before coming downstairs and through some random glitch, did not promptly have a driver sent our way, so when I called back an hour later to check on their status, the dispatcher I talked to apologized and said to give her five minutes to get someone heading my way. After I hung up with her, a driver called and said he'd be there in ten minutes. He was there in less and was nothing but wonderful (he even asked Laurel if she'd like to listen to Radio Disney, winning her over). We got in at a few minutes after six, let the cat out of the bedroom, fed Laurel breakfast and now I'm going to nap for a bit before calling his parents to let them know what's going on and rest yet more before even thinking about visitor hours, because as I'm writing this, I have been awake for 25 hours less the brief nap in the CCU waiting room.