One more cup of coffee

breathing is a good thing

Last night was different. Meredith called me a little after 5, sounding really funny, and said that her throat felt like it was swelling shut, that she was a little worried about it, and when would I be home? So, home I went to check on her. She said that she started to feel her throat swelling around 4, just as she was leaving Berkeley to drive home, and that it had been getting slowly worse. Her tongue was also swelling. She looked at some information on the Internet, which said to call 911. Instead we called the Aetna nurse hotline for Microsoft employees. The nurse there told me to hang up and call 911. OK, fine. And, anytime your own insurance company tells you to call 911, it seems like a good idea to follow the advice. It's not like the insurance company usually just casually tosses around advice that, to them, translates as 'spend lots of our money'.

I always said that one day we would be glad we lived just 300 feet from the fire station. Mountain View Paramedics were here about two minutes after calling 911, I think, and started checking her out. They gave her some oxygen, and said that an ambulance was on the way, and it was up to her whether or not to use it. As she was trying to decide, the ambulance showed up, so she decided to go ahead and take it. El Camino Hospital is pretty nearby, but it seemed safer to go with them in case her throat suddenly swelled up a lot. It's not, after all, like I would have been able to do anything about it if it had. No medical expert am I.

I followed her to the hospital, and registered her while they took her back into a room. One advantage, I decided, to being taken to the hospital in an ambulance is that you don't have to wait for your room in the lobby. The lobby of an emergency room is not full of very healthy people, many of who appeared to have been there for quite some time.

Once I registered (which really means providing evidence of insurance — that's the important thing), I got to go back and find Meredith. The nurse was checking her out, and by that point, Meredith's throat was starting to feel better. She said by then it just felt sore, but not nearly as swollen. It just happened that Meredith's regular doctor, who works out of the El Camino Hospital group, was around at the time, so he came by shortly to examine Meredith. By then she was really feeling better, so he didn't have a lot to say. The general consensus from all of the people who looked at her was that it was almost certainly some kind of allergic response, but to what no one knew. Probably something she ate.

So, in the end, it was all fine. A little scary, but at least she's fine. Afterwards, she mostly felt embarrassed at having caused so much commotion, but I'd rather cause some commotion than not and have her throat continue to swell. Given that even by 5:30, an hour and a half after this started, it was still swelling shut, who knew whether it would keep swelling or stop?

I'm glad it stopped.

Whew.

(Added later: Meredith also wrote an account of her adventure on her blog.)

Posted by Mike at July 17, 2002 05:02 PM