Halloween 2012

     As I'm sure many folks did, we sat on the front porch with the light on to witness the parade of scary and not so scary revelers.  Here's one of the not so scary.  Note the mittens in October in South Carolina.

     
     Trick or treating was not, however, the highlight of the day.  It was my couple of hours at the Roper-Saint Francis emergency room.  When I woke up this morning, it took a few minutes for the room to stop spinning.  Closing one or both eyes briefly made no difference.  Even after I sat up and waited for my gyros to spin up, I felt a bit sweaty and chilly at the same time.  Durelle said I was pale.  After sitting in the recliner for a half hour and moving as little as possible, I stabilized, but was still woozy.  We decided to visit our primary care physician who, of course, had a day off.  Another doctor in the practice filled in with, I'm sure, no reduction in competence.         After a number of diagnostics, she asked for an EKG.  There was a minor abnormality, and she wanted some further testing.  She called the emergency room and Durelle drove me down.  Actually, by then Cindy had arrived and led us there.  The went through a typical protocol of hook me up to some monitors, and inserting an IV.  The doctor called for some blood tests, a chest X-ray, and a cranial CAT scan.  The results of the latter were negative :-)  They were looking, of course, to see if I had had a heart attack, a stroke or perhaps just a TIA.  They determined that none of those things had happened.  They called it a BPV...Benign Positional Vertigo.  I guess that's the best possible outcome.  The Valium they stuck into the IV six hours ago has worn off.  My color is back, and I sat outside as the picture above shows.

     I now feel normal, but perhaps a bit limp.  I'll take it easy(er) for a while,but I think every thing is fine.  When one has a problem, it's nice to have some family around.