Unfiltered Story #244295

My husband and I have had a bad cold for a week, Saturday morning I wake up unable to speak, Saturday night my throat hurts so bad he takes me to urgent care where the doctor gives me a liquid steroid to help calm it down. Sunday night I start shaking and can’t stop, my head and arms are both wildly flailing and I wonder if I’m having a seizure. My husband takes me down to the ER where this happens. On the way my legs start shaking also.
We get there and the receptionist can immediately tell I’m not in a good state and gets me checked in. We barely sit down when the triage nurse calls my name and starts checking my vitals.
Nurse: “This is anxiety. You need to try to stay still.”
Me, whispering: “I can’t…”
Husband: “she can’t get it to stop. That’s why we are here.”
The nurse and my husband hold my arms still while she checks my vitals. We are sent back to the waiting room. 40 minutes after we arrive we are shown to a room.
A little while later, a different nurse walks by and double takes the situation.
Nurse: “Has anyone seen you yet?”
Husband: “No.”
Almost an hour after we arrive a man comes in and has me sign papers for the insurance.
An hour and a half after we get there, the doctor finally comes into the room
Doctor: “So, what’s going on?”
Husband: “She-”
Doctor: “yeah, just hold on. We’ll get your story in a minute. What’s going on?”
Me, whispering, “I can’t talk.” I gesture to my husband as I barely get the words out.
Doctor: “Sure you can.”
Husband: “Last night she-”
Doctor: “Yeah, yeah, okay, just hold on. We’ll get your story.” He looks at me. “Want to tell me?”
Me: “Shaking.” I hold my hands up to demonstrate.
Doctor: “Shaking. Well okay.” He starts walking around the bed towards me. “Can you just stop this?” He asks, holding my hand down to the bed.
What was going through my head is, no, I can’t, that’s why I’m here.
He keeps walking and uses his stethoscope on my back, then lifts my shirt up past my bra and looks at it for a moment, then puts it down and walks back to the end of the bed, picks up one of my feet and touches it, then puts it back down.
Doctor: “So if this is a reaction to the steroid there’s nothing we can do for it except to wait for it to get out of your system. I can give you an antianxiety to try and calm it down but that’s it.” He leaves.
20 minutes later a nurse comes in and gives me the antianxiety pill. I ask him for a barf bag to cough into and he gives me one. I spend the next hour and a half to two hours coughing and dry heaving into this bag. No one comes in to check on us in this time. The antianxiety has done nothing to calm down the shaking and my body is starting to hurt from all the moving.
Two hours after the pill, I’m just getting up to try and use the bathroom when the nurse comes back and says I’m being discharged. I go and use the bathroom and come back and he checks my vitals, no one else has checked them since the triage nurse did when we first arrived.
The doctor comes back in.
Doctor: “So, there’s nothing we can do about it except wait. If it gets any worse go to (Big City Hospital) because they have a neurology department, we don’t. If you come back here all I could do is send you by ambulance to there anyway.”
What he says next is the part that really got to me.
Doctor: “You can stop that now.”
When we get out and I check the discharge papers I was given, it lists the problem as ‘confusion side effect.’ My husband says next time there’s an emergency he’s going straight to the bigger hospital and not even bothering with the one in town. When we get home I nearly fall out of the car and collapse in the driveway, still shaking uncontrollably and coughing into the dirt. My husband gets me inside onto the couch where I sleep for the night. In the morning the shaking has stopped but I ache all over and my head feels foggy, and that evening the shaking starts again. Thankfully, it goes away and a week later it hasn’t come back, and I’m mostly over the cold but I still am having a hard time speaking.