and you thought YOUR Monday was bad...

Dustin had YET ANOTHER doc appointment yesterday following a late night trip to the ER on Monday. That morning he had an appointment to have some more blood drawn so they could test for a certain protein in his bloodstream. (He had been diagnosed with mono about a month ago, has residual symptoms in his system from it, and has been visiting his doc to keep tabs.) He was fine all day, just a bit of soreness in the arm from having blood drawn twice within the last 3 days, but then that night he started complaining of pain in the lower right side of his back. Chalking it up to helping his dad lift the broken garage door, he popped 2 Aleve and we headed to darts.

At the end of the night, he was feeling worse and started complaining that his left arm felt numb. I didn't believe him at first, thinking he'd just been throwing too long / too much and was over-working his muscles, so I simply told him to quit throwing.

By the time we got home, he was still complaining of the numb left arm, but symptoms had also graduated to shortness of breath / not being able to catch his breath, stabbing chest pains, and a pain in his left side around the ribs / breastbone. First instinct? Heart attack. So we hopped in the car and began the drive to St. John's.

To make a really long story short, at the ER he was given an EKG, they took 4 vials of blood, did chest X-Rays, and hooked him up to a heart monitor machine. The chest X-Rays came back normal, as did the EKG (which meant NEGATIVE for a heart attack, thank God!); his blood pressure was quite high, but he may have "inherited" the HBP from his mom, plus being nervous increased it, along with the heart rate. (101 at its highest, I believe.) The blood test came back with residual symptoms / traces of mono in his system (which we already knew), plus a higher than normal white blood cell count--which could be attributed to his body trying to fight off the remainder of the mono.

Diagnosis, according to ER? Costochondritis, which is a swelling of the cartilage that attaches the front of the ribs to the breastbone. The chest pain was due to an "unknown cause", as was the numb left arm. So they prescribed him some Motrin (to reduce the inflammation) and Vicadin (?!) for the pain. So after 4 hours in the ER, we were headed home...at 3:30 a.m.

After the visit w/ the doc yesterday, here's the complete diagnosis (according to Dr. Walls):
* Costochondritis--explains the pain around the ribcage / breastbone he was feeling, could be due to muscle overcompensation / working too fast when he was trying to catch his breath;
* Chest pain--again, due to muscle overcompensation;
* Pinched nerve--caused the left arm numbness (possibly) bc of the continual motion of throwing darts for 2 hours;
* Higher than normal level of albumin in the bloodstream. Albumin is one of the main proteins found in the blood, and his was higher than normal, but only by 0.8 points. Since it wasn't too abnormally high, the doc said it was nothing to get worked up about, and that it would eventually fall back to normal. After doing some research on webmd.com, I found that higher than normal levels of albumin are usually caused by dehydration. Or, in my hubby's case, too much soda and alcohol, and not enough water and juice.

So after 2 days of rest, plenty of liquids, and some 800 mg Ibuprofen a couple times a day, he'll be ready to return to work. (Tomorrow.) Let's just hope this ends the seemingly endless trips to the doc's office...