Another Manic Monday

We were about 4 Dixie Chick songs into my MRI when I began to bleed out.

Let's rewind.  I had my MRI on Monday.  It wasn't so bad, I changed into scrubs, they let me pick a cd off of a list of 100 (the MRI is very loud, so you wear headphones which they play music through).  I only recognized a few of the artists (I'm not good with songs or singers, ask Russell), and I thought they'd tease me if I picked Lion King off the list, so I chose Dixie Chicks.

We were taking the first sets of images, before the part where they pump the radioactive slurry into my veins. That's when I started to bleed.  I told them immediately and they stopped the machine and slid my 'bed' out.  I had already soaked their bed and machine.  I walked into the bathroom, saying that I would drive myself over to the hospital (two blocks away), and then blood began to pour out of me.  I thought the nurse was going to faint, she shouted for an ambulance, and another nurse, an Indian lady, came in with a beautiful accent and started taking my blood pressure.  I'm not sure how that turned out because the next thing I knew I was waking up on the ground surrounded by blood and people.

The ambulance arrived, and I was whisked to the ER.

My hematocrits and hemoglobins had dropped.  My blood pressure changed 40 points between laying and standing.  Shortly after I was checked in, Russell arrived, having come straight from work.

After a long period of waiting, during which I can only assume the doctors were frantically conferring with one another, and not drinking coffee in the break room, they said that they were admitting me upstairs for a blood transfusion.  It was still several more hours before they moved me, and since my ER room had nothing to look at but brick walls, and since I had been fasting since the day before (for my MRI) I was anxious to be moved so that I could send Russell to get me something to eat.

The blood transfusion took 5 hours.  They gave me two bags of red blood cells.  I asked for blood from a tall athletic black man, so I could run faster and get in touch with my African roots, but I think they gave me blood from an 80 year old arthritic woman with a sweet tooth.  They never listen.

So for the third Monday in a row my fused vessels ruptured and bled out.  There is something wrong with Mondays.

Thankfully I was in the best possible spot when it happened.  After my MRI was over, I had planned on driving the 20 minutes back to where I lived, then picking up my children and going to Costco to buy milk.  From the moment I first started bleeding, it was less than 10 minutes later before I was lying unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood.  That would have been much less convenient on the freeway, or in Costco with three children.

My Mom flew here this morning, and she is taking care of me.  As are several sweet women in my ward.  I went back to the imaging clinic to re-take my MRI today, and everyone remembered me.  Even the people who weren't working yesterday said "oh, I heard ALL about you!!"  It's so nice to be remembered.  ; )