What a day! It started out normal enough, but....it sure didn't end that way! I went in early to work, so I left before Ralph and the kids. I got a call from the school nurse at U-Prep about 9:30. AJ was in the office, and his vital signs were all over the charts. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was high and then low, and he was having a hard time standing up, and he couldn't walk up the flight of stairs at school without feeling like he was going to pass out. I called for an appointment with his doctor before I went to pick him up, but Dr. Short was full - would I see another doctor? We had an appointment with Dr. Harden at 12:30. I took AJ back to work with me, and he rested and ate snacks. (I figured he couldn't be too sick if he was hungry, right?)

I took him up to the doctor's at 12:30. They ran an EKG and did chest x-rays (we had to wait for the tech to come back from lunch for the X-rays), and then Dr. Harden wanted to consult with Dr. Short. Unfortunately, Dr. Short had evidently just gone to lunch when he decided this. We sat around until 2:30 to see him. Then, they called the cardiologist, and we had to wait for him. He came in and re-ran the EKG, looked at the X-rays, and sent us to the emergency room.

Surprisingly, there was almost no wait at the ER. We waited about 10 minutes to triage him, and he went straight from there to a room in ER. (I loosely call it a room - an area surrounded by curtains.) They monitored him and tried a few physical 'tricks' to get his heart to slow down (it had consistently been 140+ beats a minute) that didn't work, so they started medical treatment. They gave him two different doses of one drug that didn't work, and the third try - a different medicine - dropped his heartbeat within 5 minutes back to normal. He was finally discharged from ER at 7:30 last night. Both of us were exhausted!

He needs to see the cardiologist today for a follow-up. The paperwork the ER sent home is for "Supraventricular Tachycardia (Benign Rapid Heart Rate, PAT)". Hopefully, it was a one time thing, and we never go through this again!