So last week, urchin 1.0 finally recovered from her unbelievably bad cold/whatever it was, only to pass it on to me. That's fine. I'm a tough fella. (chuckle). But by Friday night, the consensus was that I was not looking my best. I knew I had a cold in my chest and a left sinus infection, but it also didn't seem too bad.

That night around 2am, I awoke with a pain in my left ear that was indescribable. I looked on the pillow and realized that I was bleeding out of my ear.

"That settles it," I said to the wife. "I'm going to the doctor in the morning for some antibiotics."

I was in the parking lot of the Doc in a box at 8:30am Saturday morning so I could be first (or second). There's no point in waiting in line first thing in the morning for a doctor, but that's just me.

So I got in first, and was greeted by Dr. Henderson (the guy that sent me to the first cardio stress test back in November) saying "How's my favorite patient?"

I told him my story, he checked my blown right ear, then wanted to listen to my lungs. He didn't like how they sounded, so he decided to do a couple of X-rays.

When they came back, he said "The good news is that you do, in fact, have an ear infection."

(That's the good news?)

"The bad news is that you've got a lot of fluid in your pleural cavity around your lungs, and I want you to go to the ER at St. Joseph's right now. I don't want you to drive there. I want you to get someone to take you and they'll take care of this."

Umm...what the fuck did he just say? Fluid in my chest? WHAT??

So I drove to my daughter's soccer game to tell the wife, who was just finishing explaining to our soccer parent friends all of the stuff we'd been thru in November. I told her, and her dad (who was in town) agreed to drive me to the ER.

I called my cardiac surgeon on the way, and I got to the St. Joseph's ER around 11am. I was in a room (Room 29, in case you were wondering) within 15 minutes and was getting poked for blood work and IV's (8 times, I believe, before they were successful thanks to my flat, dehydrated veins).

I was given a breathing treatment of Albuterol and after the Doctor looked at my X-rays, he explained what was going to happen to me.

The process is called Thoracentesis, which is:

a procedure to remove fluid from the space between the lungs and the chest wall called the pleural space. It is done with a needle (and sometimes a plastic catheter) inserted through the chest wall. This pleural fluid may be sent to a lab to determine what may be causing the fluid to accumulate in the pleural space.

Normally only a small amount of pleural fluid is present in the pleural space. Accumulation of excess pleural fluid (pleural effusion) may be caused by many conditions, such as infection, inflammation, heart failure, or cancer. If a large amount of fluid is present, it may be difficult to breathe. Fluid inside the pleural space may be found during a physical examination and is usually confirmed by a chest X-ray.

What? You want to put a what where to do what?

Anyway, they sent me down to the ultrasound department where the nurse located the right place between my ribs about halfway down my back on the left side to perform the procedure.

The doctor came in, asked me to lean forward over a table a little and he started giving me novicane injections, making a small incision, then a couple more injections, and that was that. Before I knew it he was draining the stuff.

We spent about 90 minutes doing that and he talked to me the entire time to be sure he didn't go too far and create what's called "negative pressure" in the chest cavity, which can apparently be excrutiatingly painful. (I was certainly NOT signing up for that).

When they were done, he said the fluid looked good in that it was infection free and only had a little blood in it. He was, however, a little shocked to see that he'd drained over half a gallon of fluid from my innerds.

My immediate thought was quite positive. "Hey...I just lost about four pounds. Kick ass!"

Then it was back to X-ray for another set of pictures for the after of the "Before and After," and then it was back to the ER for another breahing treatment, prescriptions, a referral to an Ear, Nose and Throat guy for my whistling eardrum, and finally to checkout.

Time total spent in the ER: about five hours.

Time wasted there: Only about 30 minutes. Yet another great time at St. Joseph's hospital (and I mean that).

So now it's heavy antibiotics, Albuterol treatments every four hours, Loritab for the pain (and believe me, there is some), and hopefully a non-surgical solution to my left eardrum.

See? Nothing exciting ever happens around here.