That was scary.

[rivka]

So: that breathing issue I was having.

The inhaler I got last week worked really well for a while. It's not a "heavens open, choirs sing" experience like a nebulizer breathing treatment is. But I'd find that when the slow-strangulation feeling began to creep up on me, it was inevitably six hours after the last dose and time to use the inhaler again.

This morning I felt pretty well. We walked to church, although I then did a fair bit of coughing. We walked home from church, and afterward even though it had only been three hours since the last treatment I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I decided it would be okay to take the dose at four hours instead of six.

I went and picked up the visiting oursin and had a lovely time chatting with her and showing her a bit of Baltimore. As time wore on I had more and more coughing, though, and had to keep my breathing very carefully shallow. When I came home at 3:45 it had only been two hours and a bit since the last dose, and I couldn't catch my breath and couldn't catch my breath.

I started noticing that it was quite an effort to take those careful shallow breaths: pull-push, pull-push. My head hurt. I felt lightheaded.

Michael and I spent some time debating our options. In the end, the whole family piled in the car and Michael drove me to Patient First, an urgent-care clinic. My breathing continued to be shallower and more labored and more uncomfortable. At Patient First, I got to jump the line and be taken straight back.

Hosanna! They gave me another breathing treatment, almost right away, and it was fantastically wonderful. It did turn out that all the incredibly hard work I was doing was paying off: my pulse ox was 97%. So I wasn't as oxygen-starved as I felt. I had the breathing treatment and a chest X-ray. I came home with steroids and antibiotics. The doctor swears that the steroids will make me instantly better. Here's hoping.

I was mightily impressed with the care experience. Everyone at Patient First was kind and seemed to take me seriously. The best part of their model: prescriptions are fully integrated into their service. It's not that the Patient First doctor writes a prescription and then you walk down the hall to the Patient First pharmacy to have it filled; the doctor talked to me, walked out of the room for a minute or two, and came back with my medications himself. Not samples, either, but regular medication packs labeled with my name and bearing full pharmacy education sheets. Not having that extra step makes a huge difference when you're really sick.

The breathing treatment lasted me from then until now. Those things really are awesome. It was so scary to just not be able to breathe like that, and to have it worsen so quickly from a previously managable level.

Comments

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

My favorite part of my own PatientFirst experience came when I was talking with the doctor. I had gone in with an earache, afraid that it was an infection, and she quickly put my mind at rest about that. She also checked to see if I was seeking narcotics, but when I looked at her quizzically and said, "It's just an earache, ibuprofen will be fine, thanks", she was visibly relieved.

The great part came right after that. The doctor I saw was the assistant medical director for the entire facility, and was clearly REALLY BUSY. However, she looked me right in the eye and said, "Do you have any other questions?", and then she stopped and LISTENED to me.

Everything else in her world stopped at that moment. It was very plain that she was focused on me, and what I had to say, and was going to deal with it, whatever it might be. It was clear that I didn't have forty-eleven different things wrong with me, and that I wasn't going to take up a huge amount of her time, but for that moment, she and I were the only two people in the world who had anything worthwhile to say. She had been bustling around the exam room, doing lots of different things; still, everything but her breathing stopped while she was LISTENING to me.

I'd gone in there to have someone with a medical license decide if I needed antibiotics for ear pain, which was pretty damn trivial, but if I'd needed to talk about some health issue, she'd have been there, listening to me. She was very deliberate about that, and it made me feel so much more reassured about the medical attention I'd received, and about the place in general.

[selki.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a great place.

I've had very good experiences with the urgent care center in my hometown. I didn't even realize there were any in Md.