What an awful fap that was...

So.  I woke up at 4:30 Christmas morning with what I thought was an earache below my left ear, radiating down my neck, just behind my jaw.  I flopped a pillow over the affected ear, and tried to go back to sleep.  Got up and took an aspirin at 5:00.  And ended up with a cascade of other symptoms hitting, one after the other. 

Kids got up at 6:30-ish, like a school morning.  And they opened presents.  It was a lot of fun to watch, but I kept feeling worse and worse as it went on. 

I asked to be taken to the ED around 7:30 or 8:00.  The last time I requested that was when my water broke eight weeks early with the imp.  But...with the symptoms I was having, I wasn't sure it wasn't an emergency.

I wound up spending Christmas in the hospital, with blood drawn frequently (and not from the I.V. port already in place...no, these were from new sticks.  Lots of other tests run, and me run all over the hospital for said tests.  And nothing by mouth until 4:30 or 5:00 p.m.  By that time, I was ready to bite someone for a drink of water.  My usual water intake is between a half a gallon and a gallon of water per day, and I had had...less than a cup by that point.  And I was going mildly nuts with thirst.

I came home yesterday before noon, with sticky patches all over the place, a bruise the size of a fifty cent piece inside my left elbow, and bruising all around the top of my right arm (those hospital blood pressure cuffs are vicious), and a new diagnosis of GERD, a new prescription for six weeks of a proton pump inhibitor...and orders to stop taking aspirin from one doctor, and orders to take a baby aspirin from another doctor.  I also came home with a doctor's orders to get a blood pressure monitor for at home, and check it twice a day, and take the record with me when I went to see my doc in three weeks.  (It's already a lot lower than it was in the hospital...and trending downward.)

I am feeling much better today than I was even yesterday, and I was feeling much better yesterday than I had been the day before.  But I am not going to do anything I don't absolutely have to, and am planning on simply reading a book for the rest of the day.  Odysseus suggested David Weber's In Fury Born...I started it day before yesterday, and I'm greatly enjoying it.  And I'm incredibly thankful it's a very long book, and that it was on one of the Baen free CDs they were putting in the hardbacks years back.  Because, while we have the hardback, it really is a long book, and kinda heavier than I could probably have managed day before yesterday.