Just to preface this, I’m fine now, don’t freak out.
So I’m sitting in class yesterday and we’d just started. I was pretty much just sitting there copying contact information onto the syllabus and taking notes on what little we talked about the first day. About five minutes into class, my side starts hurting.
It felt like a cramp, except a lot worse. However I sat, hunched over my notes, stretched out in the lab chair, or anything between, it still hurt. Worse, it began to hurt to breathe. If I took a fairly deep breath and then held it, it wasn’t so bad, but breathing out was no fun at all. For the next hour and fifteen minutes (and then some… of course the professor ran over) I just had to do my best to stick it out. Becuase to top it all of, it was the first day of class and I was determined not to walk out; even if it hadn’t been, I would have had to have been in more pain to walk out of a class taught by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. (But only slightly more pain).
They ask you at the Doctor’s office “how bad does it hurt” with those smiley/frowny face drawings numbered 0-5 with 5 being the worst pain you’d ever felt in your life. If someone had asked me that on the way home, I’d have said a 4. While I was on the phone with my mom, I’d have said a 5. Just sucking enough air into my lungs to breathe enough to speak shot pain up my entire side. Since I was halfway home by the time I decided it was that bad and called my mom, she told me to get there as fast as I could and she’d take me back the the Emergency Room.
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been driving, especially because Albemarle Hospital is right next to COA.
Long story short, I was there for about 4½ hours, taking X-Rays and other fun stuff, worrying about whether it was a kidney stones, appendicitis, or some crazy Ecuadorian parasite. Turns out I pulled a muscle in my back.
According the the ER doctor, the back is “poorly designed” (I think God might take issue with that statement) and it’s really easy to mess stuff up there (though even he admitted it’s pretty weird to just be sitting in class and have pain shoot through your side for no apparent reason).
I’ve got prescription strength muscle relaxers and Motrin on my bookshelf now and I’m getting pretty bored laying around. It still hurts to breathe, but not like yesterday, and I’m hoping to be up and running by Sunday.
The whole point of writing this is so that nobody can say “Why didn’t you tell me you went to the Emergency Room!?” And daggone it, next time I play “Never have I ever…” I’ll have to come up with a new “good one.” Mine used to be “…gone to the Emergency Room.”
