The Unexpected

Me darlin' husband decided last night that my blood pressure wasn't high enough.....
After dinner, I was upstairs taking care of laundry and Mark and the boys were outside working in the yard. Mark comes in and tells me he's having a hard time breathing. He's standing at our dresser, leaning on it, and panting for breath. Then he says that it feels like his stomach is pushing up into his chest. I start getting nervous...
I google his symptoms and come up with possible heart attack. I call Beth from her room and she comes and sees him, and gets nervous too. We wait a few minutes and it doesn't stop, in fact he seems to get worse.
We decide to call 911.
This is one of those times when living on the "family compound" is awesome. My Dad was working in the garden so he comes over; Mark's brother lives next door (he decided that he likes my family's compound too and bought a house next door). I told the boys that we called 911 for Mark, and Michael gets very upset. I don't think John quite understood...
After the ambulance arrives, Mark's sister (who is married to my brother) and lives behind us, pulled into their driveway and comes running. My brother comes home and joins us. My sister's son, drives by and sees the commotion, and stops too. It was such a comfort to be able to leave the boys to go with Mark, knowing that there was so much family there to stay with the boys.
I rode to the hospital with Mark (ambulance rides aren't exactly the most comfortable ones!) and Beth and Steve followed, along with Mark's sister Kathy, and my brother Chuck.
Fortunately, he started feeling better on the ride to the hospital. They gave him oxygen and put him on a heart monitor. At the hospital, they ran blood tests, did a chest x-ray, and ran another EKG. Everything came back normal, so they released him and told him to go to his doctor for a stress test. We arrived home about midnight.
So today, Mark is calling the doctor for an appointment. Neither one of us had gone to this doctor for almost 2 years, now we're both making extra trips.
When they were getting Mark ready to go home, Beth (it's nice to have a daughter who's going to be a nurse) stuck the blood pressure cuff on me and had the automatic machine take my blood pressure, twice, and one time it said 134/74 and the other time said 137/78. So I'm hoping that the machine is correct, though the nurse there said that they're unreliable. (so why do they keep using them if they're that unreliable?) So now I will be able to tell my doctor that next week, and hopefully, my pressure will be lower there too.
I'm feeling a bit better today....a lot less congestion....and my cough is much better. My eye is a bit better too, so the old medicine is doing it's magic.

I am amazed at how strangely calm I stayed last night. I felt like I was just living a dream or something....it was strange. Our dear Lord at work, I suppose.


A blessed Friday to all....