."Back In the Hospital Again" This one is Called... Back in the Hospital Again ---- -- --- -------- ----- Oh, OK, that overstates the case. I did something really dumb Saturday morning, like forgetting to take my dose of medicine. That's something I've done several times, with only mildly bad results. What's happened before is increased arythmias and, toward the afternoon, palpitation. I limp home after work, hand pressing chest, and curse myself for an idiot. This time it went worse. Palpitations normally start after exercise; by 2pm I was experiencing them without their depending on exercise at all. I figured that, as before, I could just tough it out until closing time--it being Saturday I was the senior person in the store and responsible for closing up. But I began to feel dizzy and nauseous, and my heart was going non-stop. So I gave myself a half-hour to walk to the train station. Now on the way home, I have to walk a couple blocks, climb about two flights to the platform, climb another two flights in Penn Station, climb one more to the Subway, and walk one very long block uphill by my house. On the way to the train, I was very dizzy and sick to my stomach, just walking on a level surface. There way *no way* I realized, that I could be sure of making it all the way home. So I caught a cab near the station, and had him take me to a hospital emergency room. ---------- They kept me in the emergency room for about three hours before they would give me any medication. If they'd let me have it fairly directly when I arrived, I could have gone home afterwards. It takes a couple hours to have effect, and until it did, I wouldn't have felt confident about leaving. But since it wasn't until 9pm or so that I got the medication, I really had no choice about staying overnight. (hour and a half trip home on the train) *sigh* But actually, I can't bring myself to regret the overnight stay, because something happened in the overnight that in all my years of living with this problem has *never* occurred before. I met another person with my problem, Transposition of the Great Vessels. .