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!