After spending the better part of Thursday visiting a couple different doctors’ offices, Rebecca is very nearly back to normal… We ended up taking her to a family practice doctor in the morning and her issues were indeed diagnosed as a spinal headache, which is a fairly common (25% of patients) side effect of a spinal tap. The doctor referred her to an anesthesiologist for a procedure called an “epidural blood patch.” It sounds more gross than it really is, but it basically involves drawing blood from the arm and re-injecting that blood back into the site where the spinal tap was performed. The spinal headaches are caused when the spinal tap hole doesn’t quite seal up as quick as it should and continues to leak small amounts of spinal fluid. Not a fun time, let me assure you. The experience with the new family practice doctor (who, luckily, is 4 miles from the house) could not have been better and she was great. She called (personally, on her cell phone) around to different anesthesiologists that she knew until she found one that would get Rebecca in yesterday instead of waiting til today. She ended up finding one that said they’d start on her as soon as we could get there, and then faxed over all the paperwork and insurance forms so that when we got there they put us right into an exam room. The procedure only lasted a few minutes, but the prep and recovery ended up making the whole process take about 3 hours and it was well worth it. By the time the nurse came out to the waiting room to get me, Rebecca was standing up, bent over putting on her shoes with next to zero pain. A huge improvement compared to the rest of the week… She’s laying low today and taking it easy but should be ready to go full speed ahead tomorrow… Note, if any of you ever have to get a spinal tap, at the first sign of headaches after the tap, check with your doctor about the blood patch procedure. The doctor at the ER Sunday morning didn’t even mention that there was anything that could be done about the headaches (other than Vicodin of course). Had we known about it earlier, we could have had Rebecca back to normal Tuesday.

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Tags: blood patch, headache, medical, spinal

$40,000 per hour is apparently the cost to run the machinery to do Head CT scans at a hospital. At least at the hospital that we spent the better part of last night / this morning at anyway… Rebecca developed a headache Friday that lingered on through Saturday and continued to get worse, bringing along its good friends dizziness and nausea. We waited it out all day yesterday and kept trying trusty Excedrin to fix it, but nothing cut it and it kept getting worse. At 2:00 this morning we called some friends who we’d had dinner with earlier on Saturday and Hope (thank you, again) came over immediately to sleep over at our place and be here to Madi-sit. We hoped we’d be home before Madi woke up and she’d be none the wiser, especially since Hope was a newbie to Madi-sitting and with the mood Madi’s been in this past week (presumably from teething), we knew she could be in for a long, long morning. We’re happy to note that not only did both Hope and Madi get to sleep until a decent hour, they both came through completely unscathed and were sitting in the rocking chair sucking their thumbs (ok, only Madi was) when we finally got home about 9:30. You’ve screwed up now though, Hope. You’re going to be the first person we call from now on when we need a Madi-sitter in the middle of the night!

Anyhow, back to the title… While we were in the ER this morning, a little boy came in with his mother and brother. He couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 and looked fine. After he got into the bed, the nurse came in to find out what was wrong and it turns out he had been getting onto the top bunk of a bunkbed at a sleepover and didn’t realize the ceiling fan was turned on, and on “high” at that. Oops. He apparently had a seriously big bump on his noggin and had been dizzy and walking funny. Obvious signs that he needed to be checked out, no? Unfortunately, we got to listen in as the “business department” representatives came in to make sure they were going to get paid for the services they’d already begun rendering, including a head CT. What followed was a fairly heartbreaking story about the little boy not having insurance, along with a lot of details I’ll leave out because they’re just not relevant. What is relevant is that the “business department” representative proceeded to give the woman what seemed like a mafia-style shakedown, telling her that “the head CT alone was $2,000 and that she’d be responsible for it!” Then, as the mother started crying, while the two little boys were watching, we were trying to keep our hearts in our chest, she was told that since it was such a “large ticket” item that she’d at least have to pay something before she left the hospital (what were they going to do, undo the CT scan if she didn’t pay?) and would that be, and I quote, “cash, check or credit?” I asked Rebecca how long the machine ran while she was getting her very own head CT done a little earlier in the morning and she said that it was maybe a couple of minutes. Granted, the Dilaudid was working its magic by this point, so let’s be generous and give them 3 minutes (which was confirmed after some quick Googling just now) for a common head CT. So, at 3 minutes each, that’d be 20 per hour. At 20 per hour, and $2,000 per procedure, that little money-maker is bringing in $40,000 per hour! Call me crazy, but I don’t buy it…

In the end, after various and assorted tests, the only thing the doctor was able to diagnose Rebecca with was a severe tension headache, with nausea and vertigo. She got sent home with some great meds, a patch (behind the ear, not like a pirate) for the vertigo and what will be later this evening a seriously sore back from the 3, yes THREE, attempts at performing a successful spinal tap to rule out an aneurysm (that the $40,000-per-hour CT machine apparently wasn’t good enough to find) and/or any forms of meningitis. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he ran the tests (the spinal tap was rough, though) and am extremely glad that every single test came back clear. The part that gets me is how much of a business transaction the entire process of going to the hospital feels like these days. That was the first time we’d been to the ER, and only the second time being in the hospital at all for either of us, with the first being when Madi was born and the business transactions had been settled far in advance… The best thing to come out of the events of this morning? Rebecca actually got a prescription from a real dr. to drink four Cokes today (the caffeine supposedly helps thwart off a second type of headache that can occur after a spinal tap that sounded very nasty)… Her eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas morning when he told her that…

UPDATE (11:20PM): Rebecca’s feeling some better, but still very nauseous and dizzy and if she tries to get up her head starts pounding. Looks like she’s getting the spinal headache after all. We’ve got some caffeine (and Vicodin) in her, so hopefully it will go away soon…

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Tags: ct scans, excedrin, headache, hope, madi, medical

So I was checking out the statistics for this site and there was one particular statistic that I found disturbing… Of the visitors that frequent this site, 78% of you are using Internet Explorer. Why is that disturbing? Because there are better ways to browse the Internet, that’s why! There are lots of reasons Internet Explorer should no longer be the browser of choice, not the least of which involves more security holes in it than you can shake a mouse at. Rather than re-hash all of the reasons to switch from Internet Explorer here, I’m going to provide a link to a site that will explain it all. Browse Happy is a site dedicated to alerting people to the potential danger from continued use of Internet Explorer as their main browser, giving testimonials, examples as well as providing links to alternative browsers. I say “main browser” because, unfortunately, it’s not yet proven feasible to completely abandon Internet Explorer. There are the occasional websites that you may run across that rely on Internet Explorer to provide some sort of functionality that other browsers do not provide (usually because it involves unsafe technologies like ActiveX). If you need to browse a site like that, by all means fire up Internet Explorer and knock yourself out. Just close it and switch back to a better browser when you’re done with that site.

Since Browse Happy has taken care of the “why switch?”, I’ll give my thoughts on “what to switch to.” The Riley household has adopted Firefox as its browser of choice. I’ve been using Firefox for the majority of my web browsing for quite some time now, since it was just knee-high to a grasshopper, but in the recent months we’ve made that our default browser at home and haven’t looked back. We still occasionally open up Internet Explorer from time to time, but it’s rare. Another browser that I’ve started using more often lately is Flock, which is based on Firefox but has some added features that make it easier to use with some of the social networking services such as Flickr (which I use to share photos),del.icio.us (which I use to share links) and so on.

In summary, I’m hoping that the next time I check up on the stats for this site I see less Internet Explorer usage and more happy browsing… I’ll report back in a month or so and let you all know how you’re doing… Oh, and for the love of all things good and holy, please use a screen resolution higher than 800×600…

Posted in Rants | 3 Comments
Tags: browsers, firefox, flock, statistics