My Trip to the Hospital in the Nice Red Van.

I have a very interesting morning. I at home now fighting off drowsiness just to write this blog, so I can go to sleep.

Shortly after arriving at work this morning I was suddenly hit with a wave of nausea, light-headedness, and vertigo. It literally knocked me off my feet. I managed to grab a nearby chair and ease myself down to the floor. The whole time the room seemed to be spinning rapidly around me. I dang near threw up. Lucky for me no students were in the classroom at the time.

After sitting on the floor, spinning around in my head, for a few minutes I managed to pull myself up into a chair. About this time one of my co-workers came in and saw me with my head over the trash can and moaning about how I wished the room would stop spinning. She told one of the students to go and get an EMT (our campus has an EMT training course at our location), to come check me out.

The EMT instructor (who just happens to be a certified EMT) came in to check me out. He said my pulse was high and since I had "hit the floor" due to my vertigo, it was campus policy to call an ambulance to take me to the hospital to check me out. When the ambulance arrived, the EMT's from there took my blood pressure, it was a whopping 169 over 124. Dang! They didn't tell me what the pressure was they just said it was very high and asked if I was suffering any other symptoms other than vertigo and nausea. I told them no, all I wanted to do was just lay down a minute and let the room stop spinning. But being good EMT's they told me that my high blood pressure would not allow them to just let me lay down. Since I couldn't walk straight due to the vertigo, they strapped me to a gurney and wheeled me out to the ambulance and took me to the hospital to be checked out.

After going through a brief medical history they stuck me with an IV and told me wait until the doctor came to check me over. Turns out my condition was probably caused by a reaction my body had to two different cold/allergy medications I have been taken to try and shake off this "crud" I have had for the past two weeks. They said the combination of the medicine I took for allergies and a dose of cough medicine I took last night, caused my blood pressure to shoot up and that is what they think caused my sudden episode of vertigo and nausea.

After a near 3 hour stay at the hospital, my blood pressure finally went back to normal. The doctor gave me some pills to help with vertigo and told me to check with my regular doctor about the blood pressure. He told me to sleep the rest of the day and I should be OK to go back to work tomorrow pending what my regular doctor tells me.

So here I am, half drugged out of my skull and about to fall asleep at the computer. I guess I need to go to sleep and see how I feel in the morning.