Rough

It has been a rough past few days.  On Monday, my wife called me at the U in the early morning saying that her heart was racing and her blood pressure was up.  She was afraid she was dying.  I had to race home to take her to the emergency room.  

After spending several, very long hours at the hospital, and having her receive IV fluids, an EKG, and a calming pill, she was discharged as being physically fine and having suffered a panic attack.  This is what I had suspected from the moment I received the phone call based upon my background knowledge in medicine.  However, even though I suspected this from the first moment, I did not want to do the wrong thing by not taking her to the emergency room.  

Sitting there in the hospital for a huge number of hours was not particularly beneficial for me.  The extreme tension and anxiety I felt, along with the standard, hard, and very low seated visitor chairs at the hospital ended up helping my lower back to fully lock.  When I awoke on Tuesday morning, my back was so rigid and tight that even to get out of bed, I would have searing streaks of pain in my back and legs.  It was a real challenge just getting out of bed.  Because it literally hurt like hell, I thought perhaps if I went on my walk, I could get my back to loosen up and return to normal.  I went on my walk, but it was a difficult challenge just to walk because of the extreme pain.  And because of the pain I was experiencing, it took me a little over three times as long to complete.  By the time I got home, I was wringing in sweat and utterly exhausted from the effort.  Fortunately, I did not need to go to the U yesterday, so I  lied down and slept most of the day, only waking up occasionally to try various other postures and body positions and stretches to try to loosen up the muscles in my lower back. 

My wife seems to be doing fine today, and my back is probably 75% back to normal.  I am taking it a bit easy at work today, but I forced myself to jog about half of my normal walk.  I thought the jogging might help to further loosen by back a bit, and it seemed to help some.  I am hoping for a fairly normal rest of the day and hopefully rest of the week.  

PipeTobacco