Okay. First thing's first - I'M FINE!

But last night at 1:30 in the morning I was in an ambulence taking me to the hospital.

I had woken up with no feeling in my arm, which is not unusal, but what followed was. The feeling wouldn't come back. I shook it and played with it for a while, but to no avail, so I got up and went into the bathroom so I wou;dn't wake up Jenn with my strangeness. As I was sitting there, after about 5-6 minutes, I felt a throbing in the vein on the back of my upper arm, and then a rush pf blood to my arm, which I thought, "great, good, I can go back to..." and then I came to with greyed out vision and my head between my knees and a pounding in my chest. My first thought was, "Okay, now, which arm is it that hurts when you have a heart attack?" WHich I cou;dn't remember, so I levered myself up, and - feeling somewhat better - moved over to my computer, and fired it up and searched the internet for "Heart Attack Symptoms." I wasn't super worried, but I kept thinking of my cousin distant - by marriage- who had died extremely young of a heart attack.

Sitting at the computer and waiting for it to come up with search results, the room greyed out again and I almost fell out of my chair. At that point I staggered into the bedrom and pounded on the wall yelling at Jenn to get up, then I collapsed onto the bed in a cold sweat, pale as a ghost. Needless to say, Jenn was a little shaken up by this, and asked if I needed to go to the hospital, to which I replied yes. She looked at me, saw the shaking, paleness, clamminess, and whatnot, and suggested that maybe an ambulance ought to be in order, to which I agreed, which I think frightened her even more, since I am NEVER wanting to go to the hospital, and if we go, we can damn well drive ourselves, since the hospital is only about 6 blocks from us.

About three minutes later, two very nice paramedics came up with sirens blazing, and hooked me up to every electrode and device known to man, which showed, among other things, that my heart was fine, my blood pressure normal, and my heart rate okay. They took me in anyway, figuring that bloodwork might be in order, but they didn't turn on the siren or anything, since I was walking down to the ambulence, and hadn't passed out agian.

After a remarkably short wait (even though everyone ahead of us went first) We were seen first by an affable if rather large male RN with more blood pressure monitoring gear, and then surprisingly soon by the doctor on watch.

Apparantly if your upper extremities fall really really asleep, and apparently this mostly happens to lightweights who drink more than they are accustomed and fall asleep on a limb "really hard", and your neck nerves crick up too, blood can start pooling in your lower body. When the blood eventually rushes back into your limb, your blood pressure temporarily drops, and you can grey-out and even collapse. Apparantly this isn't that uncommon, although I have never heard of someone passing out from having their arm asleep before. Side effects? Apparently my arm will be tingly for some time since it was so cut off from blood, but if it stays like that for more than a week to go see my family doctor.

So bottom line, no heart attack, no stroke, do broken off blood clots, just fell asleep on my arm. Kind of upsetting, though, a but embarassing that I went to the hospital because my arm fell asleep (although to be fair, I went to the hospital because I passed out twice). Nice thing, though, is that the emergency room at the Mis on a Friday night, unlike the ones at the university and grey nuns, is not packed with bleeding drunk people. It's just not that kind of hospital. The guy next to us, however, and his rather-too-perfectly-turned-out-at-3:30-in-the-morning girlfriend (Jenn initially thought maybe escort, although genuine familiar concern seemed to rule that out) seemed to be ODing on something clubbish, what with all the vomiting and him telling the girl to go to the triage nurst and tell them "oh, and tell them I took, like three puffs on this, too" handing her his ventolin. Yeah. He didn't seem to be having an asthma attack, more of a shaking vomiting attack.