This nurse goes to the hospital....

(at least my bp was getting back to normal here.

when I first got there and was in so much distress,

my bp was 140/98, which is HUGE for me!

I'm usually on the low side.)

And the hospital admits her.

Scary, huh.  It was to me.  I still don't feel good, so this will be short and sweet.

The short of it is.... I began having stroke type symptoms.  At first I thought it was vertigo... room tipping, nausea, etc.  But then with the headache and everything else, my left arm became very weak and tingly.  Like I said, they admitted me to a private room.  My symptoms were real and my left arm was objectively weak.  Plus, my (real) dad died from a stroke and he was young.  So this was scary.

The first CT scan was negative.  My labs were out of control as usual, which was a bit discouraging because after the last Benlysta infusion, at least one of them had come down drastically.  But to no avail, it's up again now.  The next day they did a spiral CT to check the blood flow through my neck to my brain and then did an MRI of the brain and all three of these looked good.  So that was GREAT news!

They narrowed it down to a TIA (mini stroke) which gives you symptoms but doesn't show up on tests and goes away quickly.... or a migraine.  A particularly nasty kind of migraine that some people (especially lupies) can have where you have an aura and it's usually neurologic symptoms.  Mine seems to be vertigo symptoms, L arm weakness, ringing in the ear, nausea, etc. They treated me a bit for the migraine and it seemed to help.  So, they let me come home with a promise to return to the neurologist for further study and to take the migraine meds as needed.

Well, I needed them today.  I made the mistake of eating some chips that were "Queso" flavored.  Something in those things triggered it and here came all the same symptoms back!  I took the meds and it took three hours for the left arm weakness to begin to subside.  I'm woozy right now because I think I still have a bit of medicine head, but It's not the nauseating, room tilting bit from before, so that's good.

The main thing is rest.  So, I'm going to go do just that.

lurve you, xoxo v.

 E.R. feet