Friday, June 15, 2012

Feeling A Clot in the ER

I hadn’t been to the Emergency Room for six years, and only then because it was a weekend and I’d been kicked in the head while heading a football towards the bottom corner of a goal in a grassy recreational corner of Montgomery County. Although the insurance company largely paid up, I saw later from the bill that the two stitches they put in just above my left eye on a Sunday afternoon cost the best part of $1000. It was by a fair distance the most valuable goal I’ve ever scored.

"Make way, calf strain victim!"
Otherwise, I tend to avoid the Emergency Room unless I’m in a lot of pain and it’s outside of a doctor’s normal hours. You hear of stats reporting that the vast majority of all emergency room visits are not, in fact, emergencies. You don’t want to be the one sitting there with a vague ache in the head while accident victims with seconds to live are rushed past you and through several sets of double doors, as they always seem to be on television ERs. Which always makes me wonder why they have so many sets of double doors in Emergency Room buildings. Don’t you want to get people through to the operating theatre quickly? Then build corridors with fewer sets of heavy metal doors, for Christ’s sake.

Anyway, last Saturday morning I had a pain in the left leg, which had been getting worse for four days. I thought it was a football injury, but they usually get better when you apply muscle rub and scoff ibuprofen. But this was keeping me awake all night, when I was horizontal and restful, and it wasn’t just pain, it was ***ING PAIN. So bad that I got out of bed and went straight to the ER.

But pain is like love, it’s not always constant. By the time I got there, it had subsided.