Since I worked the weekend and am now in my night week, I asked Bennett if I could work early on Monday. Monday afternoon, I was sleeping and got a text (well not right then…who among us is not a huge fan of “Do Not Disturb” in iOS 6?) from Brian saying he thought he was having a migraine.
A little while after that, he called me to tell me that he was going to leave work (this was around 2pm) and head to his parents house. Brian said his headache was bad and he had a scotoma (dark or blind spots in one eye). When he got in his car, he was very sensitive to light. He called me again, maybe 10 minutes later, to tell me his arms were tingling and he was having a hard time breathing, so I told him to go to the nearest ER – this began many frantic phone calls between Brian, his mom, his work in Marion, and me. He could have gone to Wyandot in Upper Sandusky, but he didn’t want to end up lost…so he (stupidly) persevered and went on to Tiffin. I left home right away and drove in that general direction, and his parents headed towards Tiffin Mercy.
None of us saw it (thank goodness, because I would have freaked the eff out), but when Brian got to the ER, he couldn’t make words to tell them what his problem was.
They did an EKG and put an IV port in (and drew blood for troponins, I read later on the paperwork) and put him in a room (not on a monitor at all – which seems weird, since they did an EKG and drew troponins, right??!). I got to the hospital a little before 4, and went back to Brian’s room. He looked really bad. He still had not seen a doctor or been given anything for the pain, and he was rating his pain at 10/10 and wincing every couple of seconds. He had puked from the pain by the time I got there. He did not see a doctor or get anything for the pain for at least another hour, and I was sending his mom angry texts about how shitty the care was at Tiffin Mercy Hospital the whole time. At some point, Brian’s mom asked at the desk about her son in room 6 getting some pain meds, and the person at the desk said, “There is no patient in room 6.” Tiffin Mercy might be the Seneca County version of St. Lukes. Also, Brian did not fit on the bed they had him on, and the pain was so bad that his eyes watered.
Finally, the (one working ER) doctor came in and did some neuro checks and had Brian tell him what had happened so far, and they talked about the one comparatively mild migraine that Brian has had – in 2009 when our basement rooms were being finished. The doctor told him they would do a CT and that he’d order some pain meds for him…so 3 hours after he came in with 10/10 pain, Brian got some Zofran and some Dilaudid and started to look like a human again. Not long after that, someone came and wheeled him off for a CT scan. When he got back, he heaved and heaved the Sprite he had drunk earlier. Because I am a dutiful life partner, I stayed with Brian and then emptied out his puke basin (and that’s how I prepaid my debt for whatever happens at Wisdomteethageddon, boys and girls…also see: had the crap scared out of me by Brian’s terrifying and unfamiliar migraine aura symptoms).
An hour and a half after that, the doctor came back and said that he was confident that Brian was having his second migraine. The urinalysis/blood work were fine, so there was no meningitis or other infection, the CT was clear, and all the cardiac stuff was fine. He said that in strokes, tingling and other sensations would likely be one-sided, and a stroke causing symptoms on both sides would likely be fatal (um, I feel like someone could have told us that earlier to make all of us migraine-n00bs stop worrying so much, but whatever). He wrote Brian some scripts for pain & nausea meds, as well as for some Imitrex. I headed home so I could take a nap and go to work that night (even though Brian was doing much better, there was no way he would have been able to ride in the car for more than an hour to come home), so his mom kept him, picked up his prescriptions, and checked on him periodically. They got home after 9, and Brian ate pizza and went to bed. He slept late the next morning and was finally allowed to drive home, and he took a nap when he got here. He had a couple of days with a little headache where he seemed kind of sub-par (Postdrome!) but he’s much improved today.
I’ve been doing a little reading about migraine auras – did you know that only 20% of migraines have auras? Also, some aura symptoms (that Brian, disappointingly, did not have) include feeling like your teeth don’t fit in your mouth and the feeling that one extremity is growing and they others are not. Maybe next time we can trade frightening aphasia for one or both of those.