One of the few perks of working beside the emergency room is that when you think you may be dying, well, it's right there, innit?

A few weeks ago I'd spent a couple days with some serious back pain - can't stand up straight-jeesus!-where are the painkillers! - kind of back pain.  The weird thing was that despite having a back injury I just don't normally go to bed perfectly fine and wake up 8 hours later suddenly unable to uh, stand up.

Nevertheless, I chalked it up to some typically Jen-like quirk of my injury, downed some naproxen and a cask or two of wine and soldiered on. Three days later, flank pain had joined the party and on Sunday I had woken up with a constant left-sided chest pain.

Being a cynical hospital worker who periodically mocks the young people who come in with chest pain I was tempted to just ignore it.  No baby, me.  But then, my little reptile brain kicked in and I start to worry that maybe, just maybe, something was kind of ...wrong.  If you know me at all, I'm sure you're on the same page as me when I say that I don't expect anything to be simple or easy these days.

So after a couple hours at work, I gave in and scooted over to the ER, signed myself in, got my little wristband and went back to work until they were ready to see me. 

A chest xray and a CT KUB (kidney, ureter, bladder) later, they told me I could go back to work.  The ER doc figured it's not that kidney infection still hanging about, I don't have kidney stones (thank god!  I seriously don't want to have to pee one of those babies out, EVER), I'm not having a heart attack, my labs are just as perfectly normal as they always are and while I may want to see a urologist about the (TMI alert) fact that I pee every 20 minutes all day long, he can't rule out a mechanical (ie: back injury) cause and hey, sometimes chest pain is just something weird, yet utterly normal.  I thought it was quite sweet of him, being near my own age, to share that he'd had chest pain for a year but that he really was perfectly fine.

I'm going to digress just a minute here for the kind of neato stuff before I get to the "denouement".  

One of the other cool things about where I work is that the guy who reads the films is a "coworker" so I went in and sat with him while he pointed out things they don't normally put in the reports and answered a couple of my questions.

Things like that my heart size is excellent for someone my age, my lungs are awesome and look!  see all that cloudy stuff there?  that's 27 years of smoking, lady!  *cue lecture*. 

Here's a screen shot of part of the CT.  If you biggie it and check out the lungage area you'll notice that you can see all the little veiny-like things like they've been injected with dye (yes, I am so technical) . That's the smoking.  I haven't seen a non-smoker's CT scan but I'm going to assume that on theirs you wouldn't see those veiny things at all.  Also, it's a tad embarrassing to note that you can see my spare tire and the fact that I have no "waist".

The other thing you can see on this is something I have had absolutely no idea about for the last 22 years.  That little red arrow is pointing to the clips that were left behind when they took my gallbladder out when I was 17.  Now, I realize that it probably doesn't occur to surgeons to mention that clips are left behind after EVERY surgery but, EWW!  GROSS!  Those things have been in my body all this time and no one told me.  Yuck.

The rest of the report mentions that I have no urinary stones, that the portions of the liver they could see had no lesions (thank god, since I was sure I'd be a candidate for a monkey liver by now) and that my appendix is unremarkable.

Since I've been reading so much in the last few years about visceral fat  (fat around your organs) and how that, especially for women it's so very very bad for you, I asked the radiologist how my padding was looking in there.  He said that I had less than most people my age.

I rock.

The other interesting thing (*cue another lecture*) is, in his words, "See that?  That's from smoking and one day you'll wake up and you won't be able to feel your legs.  Then we'll have to take you up to the heart cath lab and clean that puppy out." 

The little red arrow is pointing at a little white dot.  In radiologist speak, that's "a trace of calcified plaque in the abdominal aorta."  So, if my family were, say, a heart problem family (atherosclerosis) as opposed to a cancer family, then I'd probably have to really watch this.  Although, to be fair, all you smokers out there with cold feet or bad circulation - you've got plaque too.

On one hand, radiation aside, I'm glad I got the tests done because it really does go a long way towards setting my overactive mind at ease (which I'm sure is partially due to working in a hospital and routinely seeing really sick, really young people).  I mean, as you get older, don't you worry about what's going on in there?  Has all that Coke you drank eaten away your kidneys?  Did that 40 pounder of Jack every weekend and all those shots of Jager you did in your twenties kill your liver? Has all the gum you ever chewed totally clogged up your bowels?  Are you with me here? 

On the other hand, the pain kept keeping on and I had no idea what the hell was going on.

About a week and a half ago, I started noticing that I'd get amazingly terrible stomach pains in the afternoons and, trust me, none of the usual culprits were present.

And then, it occurred to me.... The all important question.  What pills are the doctors giving me now?  You may remember the lumbar puncture from last Christmas when they thought I had some sort of rare fungal meningitis but really it was the relatively uncommon side effects of diclofenac?    And how about the last two years where I've slept 14 hours a day and it turned out not to be my body trying to heal itself but a rare side effect (hypersomnia) of the cipralex?  What about that time that penicillin made my entire body go become one big hive and all my skin peeled off?  And the Prozac in my early 20's that made me a tad erm...angry and narcoleptic?

Have I learned from these things?  Nooooooo.

Turns out that flank pain, muscular aches and back pain, chest pain and acute abdominal pain are all potential (yet not very common) side effects of those cute little smartie-like IRON SUPPLEMENTS I started taking right before this all happened because my ferritin stores are too low.  And that, lo and behold, it got really bad about an hour after I'd taken the pill, whether I took it with food or not.

*sigh*

I'm seriously considering tattooing, "Feel like shit, Jen?  What pills are the doctor's bright idea this week?" across the back of my hand. It'd save me a lot of time, money and trouble, I tell ya.