Friday night/Saturday morning was a scary time for the Dailey’s. Jeff got home from work and took a bath which was nothing unusual. I had dinner ready and was dishing it up when he got out of the tub. He told me he didn’t want anything to eat because he wasn’t feeling well and that he was nauseous. He didn’t look well and since he wasn’t eating I knew it was something serious. The kids and I ate our chili and Jeff sat at the table with us. He walked away a few times thinking he may get sick but never did. He kept saying “I just don’t feel right”. After dinner he went to lay down while Jayden and I cleaned up quick and then I went to pick up Kiarra from volleyball. During the time I was gone, he asked Jayden if he would know what to do if he was told to call 911. Jayden told me this when I walked in the door (I was only gone 15 minutes) and that was the start of our scary evening. I immediately went into check on Jeff and he didn’t look right. He said his heart was racing and that he just didn’t feel right. I grabbed my laptop and got on WebMD (which can be scary in itself) to look up symptoms of heart problems, heart attack, heart palpitations, etc. I started asking him a series of questions, “do you have pain in your arm, do you have pain in your chest, is your back hurting, are you short of breath”… the answer to all these questions was NO. We tried to check his pulse but couldn’t…it would beat…..beat…..beat-beat-beat-beat-beat… I knew something was wrong but stayed as calm as possible. Everything I read said “don’t wait 5 minutes, call 911 immediately. Don’t drive yourself to the hospital or have a spouse drive you, call 911”. We contemplated calling 911 but didn’t want to scare the kids and since we live so close to the hospital we knew I could get him to the hospital in 4 minutes and it would take an ambulance 10-15 minutes just to get here. I had Kiarra take the kids upstairs to watch a movie and told her what was going on and asked her not to tell the other kids.
We got to the hospital and the waiting room was packed, there were 20-30 people waiting and I knew it was going to be a long night. We checked in, sat down and before starting a conversation they called him into the triage room. This is when the craziness started! They did an EKG in the triage room, along with checking his blood pressure and all the other normal stuff. They called to the back and said they had a serious AFib and needed to bump someone. I now know that AFib is Atrial Fibrillation but Friday evening it only meant something very serious because I could hear the seriousness in their voices. His heart rate at that moment was 150 beats per minute and his blood pressure was 176/93. Normal heart rate is 50-100 so looking at the lower of that, his heart was beating 3 times what it should be. From the triage room he went into another holding room where the action began. They started putting more stickers all over his chest, checking blood pressure every 2 minutes and nurses were hustling around. Another nurse knocked on the door opened it and said to our nurse “we have a heart patient here that is about to die so you need to finish up in here so we can get things moving”…. our nurse said, “yes, I know I have him right here”! That is when I realized this was serious and that is when I got scared. The doctor busted through the door a minute later, practically causing me to have heart failure, and started asking Jeff a round of questions. He told him that his heart was beating faster that someone running a marathon! They put in an IV, took blood (8 tubes to be exact), brought in an x-ray machine to take a chest x-ray and were monitoring his heart constantly. This all happened within 5 minutes of walking into the ER! Things were moving so fast, it was like being in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Jeff was in pretty good spirit, still feeling “not right” but feeling ok if that makes any sense. A room in the ER opened up and he was transferred to a room. At this point, his heart rate was anywhere from 140 – 190 beats per minute! It was scary! To sum it up, instead of it beating once a second, it was beating 3 times a second or more! Our nurse was panicking and that wasn’t helping any. I tried to ask her a question and she about bit my head off and said “I CAN’T ANSWER YOU RIGHT NOW I HAVE TO GET HIS HEART RATE DOWN”!! Would have been nice if she had the medication at that time to get it down but she was only doing some paperwork type stuff in the computer. The doctor ordered some meds to slow down his heart it’s just that the ER was so busy that things were taking longer than normal. We were there an hour before the meds finally came but the nurse was in our room the whole time monitoring his heart and the doctor popped in a few times when it was in the 170’s-180’s to make sure he was feeling ok, breathing ok and not short of breath. Everyone that came in would ask him if he was having chest pain, arm pain, short of breath, etc. The nurse gave him the meds and went to get another pill and next thing we know her shift has ended and we have another nurse. Our new nurse was much more calm and collective and tried tracking down the lost pill. It took 2 hours to get a new pill from the pharmacy. To say the ER was busy is a complete understatement. At this time they started re-routing ambulances to other hospitals because the ICU was full and the ER was full. People were waiting 3-4 hours to be seen and to top it off, they were a nurse short! The first round of meds got his heart rate down to the 130’s - 150’s but they needed it to be lower that 120. A rate of 120 is considered too high but that was low compared to the 190 an hour earlier. They wouldn’t let him get out of the bed and you know what it’s like to lay on a 2 inch sponge mattress! His biggest complaint was that his butt hurt from sitting in that bed.
They did another EKG (I think this was number 3 or 4) and the each time they did one, the results were better. The doctor informed us that his blood work came back clean and there were no signs of blood clots or heart disease. Within 30 minutes of the first round of meds, the second round of meds were ordered but it took 2 hours for Jeff to get them. The doctor had come in 2-3 times asking if he’d received the second round of meds yet and was pissed off that they hadn’t given them to him yet. It was just really busy. There was a kid next to us screaming his head off, an old man on the other side of us that had just suffered a stroke, someone down the hall that sounded like they were having a baby – it was crazy busy! Our new nurse was no longer our nurse but now the charge nurse and we now have another new nurse who was the best yet. She took real good care of us, and I do me ‘us’! She went and got Jeff a comfy chair that reclined to get him out of the bed, offered us warm blankets and let me lay on the not so comfy ER bed (which was much better than the chair I had been sitting in)…she is also the one that found the missing pill and gave him the second round of meds. Jeff’s heart rate slowly started to come down and the doctor decided to admit him to the ICU. But, the ICU was still full so he had to stay in an ER room…He is now an ICU patient in the ER…weird, but whatever! The only good news about this was that they brought him a hospital bed and I got to upgrade to the comfy chair. AMEN! Once they got him in the bed and situated, he was able to sleep and his heart rate dropped to a normal rate 70’s – 80’s. I say sleep but that doesn’t really happen in the hospital, let alone the ER. They still had to come in every few minutes to cut off the monitor because it was beeping REALLY LOUD every time his heart rate went up or down to much too fast (which happened the entire night). Around 8 am they told us he’d be moving to a room upstairs. Since things had calmed down I thought I’d ask the nurse a few questions, one of which she gave me an answer that took my breath away. My question to her “what would have happened if we wouldn’t have come here and he wouldn’t have been treated” her response, “his heart would have given out, it simply can’t keep up with working so hard and it would have just stopped working”. WOW, talk about a surreal moment. She went on to tell me that he wouldn’t have had a heart attack, he would have eventually gotten short of breath and his heart would have stopped! This is the reason they kept asking him if he was short of breath! What would we do without this wonderful medical treatment! Thank GOD!
They prepared him to move to the 5th floor and by 9:00 he was wheeled into room 519. He no more than got to his new room and the nurses were under pressure from the Cardiologist to get him hooked up to the monitors. It was round 2 of craziness to get him hooked up. Our dear friend Chris showed up because I managed to make a quick phone call to Lynette. The nurse did another EKG and the Cardiologist came in to talk to him. He asked a million questions and wanted to know every detail that happened Friday night and over the past 10 years (this had happened to Jeff 10 years ago). He was great! By this time I had talked to the kids and told them what was going on and that Daddy was in the hospital but was ok. I asked Mom to bring them over so they could see Daddy and see that he was ok. Mom and the kids left and Jeff’s brother Cory came by. The ultrasound lady came in and did an ultrasound of his heart right there in the room. This was amazing! To see the organ that pumps all the blood to your body was breath taking. Technology is amazing! An hour or so later the on call doctor came in to see him and decided he would discharge him since his heart rate had been down to a normal rate for 7 hours or so. A little weird that he went from the ICU to being discharged in a matter of 3 hours. By 12:30 pm (Saturday) we were walking out the door to the car with a few prescriptions in hand. All in all the doctors said he needs to loose 20 pounds, stop lifting so much weight, and stop using the nasal spray that he has been using for several months for his allergies. He’ll follow up with the Cardiologist next week, and our regular family doctor soon after. He is back to normal now and feeling great!
To our dear friends and family…I’d like to apologize to you for not calling when we went to and were in the ER. It was crazy and there were nurses and doctors around constantly and I honestly didn’t have a minute to even think about calling. I was really scared and just watching the heart monitor every second. Once things finally settled down, it was after midnight and I didn’t want to bother and/or worry you.
