The day a doctor told us to go to the ER when we didn't actually have to

Last Friday James was dizzy.  He sometimes just gets dizzy and it goes away, but this was worse than usual.  I was gone to Knoxville that day, and when I got back it was after normal business hours. James asked me to look at his eyes when he lay on his side, and they were kind of scary: he was trying to look straight at my face, but his eyes kept moving side to side, like he was reading.  His eyes also dilated very, very quickly until I almost couldn't see his iris anymore.  I decided that this wasn't a permanent trait I wanted in a husband, so we looked up the closest urgent care we could find since nobody would be open again until Monday.

We drove about 45 minutes to the Morristown urgent care clinic, where the nurse saw us, got James's info, and went to talk to the doctor.  She came back and said, "The doctor says he knows what it is and you need to go to the ER right away to get a CT scan."  We were confused that the doctor wouldn't see us, but thought that maybe he was trying to save us money by not charging us for a visit, so with that ominous set of directions we headed to the Morristown ER.  They stuck James on a monitor and we sat there for typical ER waiting times until the doctor came.

By the time the doctor arrived at 9 pm, James hadn't eaten for 8 hours, and I was feeling uncomfortably peckish myself. They told him upon arrival to not eat anything in case he needed any procedures done.  (Did I mention it was supposed to be our fancy go-out-to-dinner-to-have-possibly-our-last-date-before-baby night?  Seriously, though, this was much more memorable than that would've been!)  But the doctor made up for all that.  She was excellent.  She knew James was a med student, so when she came in she asked him what he thought it was.  He told her he thought it was benign positional vertigo, but with the eye thing he wasn't so sure anymore.  He was right!  She talked to him about how to tell the difference between this diagnosis and other similar ones, reassured us about the eye thing, and had some fun tests where they checked his cranial nerves.  She gave him some interesting pointers on how to make absolutely sure it wasn't a stroke when he had older patients with these symptoms.  She was fantastic.  She told us that we didn't have to come to the ER, and to watch out for that particular urgent care clinic because they had a history of sending panicked patients to the ER for no reason.  What a bummer of a reputation, huh?

We also learned that this vertigo was likely due to spring allergies which led to conditions affecting balance (like stuffed sinuses and excess earwax production in the presence of pollen) and we learned that this chunk of Tennessee is the worst in the country in terms of spring allergies because of all the different types pollen and the way the mountains funnel it together in the air right before Kentucky begins.  Who knew?  Now we do!  And I've never had someone tell me that my husband needs to go to the ER right away. Those are powerful words, folks!  Let's avoid saying that too often; it's not a good feeling.  The good feeling was knowing he was fine, and that he will be good at diagnosing this in himself and patients in the future!

Chattanooga Choo Choo!

Last week was James's spring break, but not mine.  Since I don't work on Fridays, though, we took the opportunity to have one last hoorah trip together before the baby.  We only live about 3 hours from Chattanooga, and the city has a cool-sounding name, so that's where we went.

We figured it was a bad idea to go to Chattanooga and not do anything train-related, so we opted for the incline railway up Lookout Mountain.  The wait to get on said train was about 45 minutes, but when there were two extra seats in an earlier car and James said we'd be willing to help them out, the other passengers took one look at us and let us go ahead.  Ah, the perks of pregnancy.  This railway was pretty cool.  When you got in, the angles of the seats and the superfluous "steps" of the walkway between the seats were a bit off, but it wasn't remarkable.  However, by the time you get to the top, the angles were perfectly upright and the steps formed a staircase to climb out.

You see, this car went from being flat on the ground to resting at a 72.7% grade/incline.  That's pretty steep.  This is the steepest passenger railway in the world!  One mile at an incline steadily increasing until the end when it's almost straight up.  The car had windows on the roof, and if you look in the picture, you can see that the only way to see straight out to the city in front of you is to look through the roof.  There are two cars on the railway that pass in the middle and work on a pulley system.  It's a pretty cool setup.

The railway did warn us that the altitude change might take us by surprise, and we quite enjoyed the idea of altitude sickness at the mountain's height of 2100 feet.  It is a tall mountain in the middle of an otherwise flat area, so the difference in height is fairly impressive, but not all that dangerous to people familiar with other mountains.  At the top of the picture here, you can see here the last bit of track (in black) by the station at the top. See? I told you it was steep!

There was once a Civil War battle atop this mountain, and one of the big problems the soldiers on top faced was trying to shoot cannons at the oncoming troops; when they'd aim the cannon, the cannon ball would roll out because the angle was too steep.  Thus began the American Bowling Association.

We also went to the Tennessee Aquarium.  (Let's be honest: this aquarium is the real reason we chose to go to Chattanooga.)  It was fantastic!  The aquarium is so big that when you get a ticket, you get into two separate buildings - one for freshwater fish (River Journey) and one for the ocean (Ocean Journey).  We started with the River Journey (the bigger of the two).  This was incredible!  You start at the top and circle your way down the whole building.  They had all sorts of fishes as well as frogs, turtles, alligators, crocodiles, birds, etc.  (The top part gets natural light and warmth, so the birds just flit around pooping on people.)  We got to pet big old sturgeons, watch a squabbling trio of brother otters, and there were some incredible tanks deeper in with ENORMOUS arapaima.  My favorite were the paddlefish with their long snouts and their sometimes-opened-and-gaping mouths patrolling the waters.  

James's favorite was the electric eel.  (This was James's first time to an official aquarium, by the way!)  Many places, the TN Aquarium included, hooked up the electric eel tank to some LED lights and a speaker that showed when the eel was giving off any electricity.  We happened to arrive around feeding time, so it was neat to watch Mr. Eel search for and eat his pray and listen to the speakers crackling. At one point in the feeding, one of the other small fish in the tank brushed against the eel's back and spooked him.  The lights and speakers went CRAZY and then....there was a dead fish floating above Mr. Eel.  Dead fish.  Zap.  The end.

In fact, we were so impressed by the freshwater aquariums that the ocean was kind of a letdown.  We got to pet sting rays, and they had a butterfly garden room, and they had some truly fantastic jellyfish exhibits, but their main tank that extended in little pockets around the building wasn't as fun as the big tanks in River Journey.  Yes, they did have sharks and penguins and corals, and they were lovely.  But the electric eel was hard to top!  Both buildings were by far the best aquariums I've been to, and it was very fun.

We also went to Coolridge Park, which connects to Walnut Bridge which is, we were informed, the longest pedestrian bridge in the US.  It's been a day of big deal visits!

We drove home through an enormous and windy rainstorm (it turns out we drove through a Tornado Warning...oh, wow, that season's started again, has it?) but we're back and set for the next while.  When we hear the train go by our house, we'll just smile and remember.