At 1:00 a.m. last night I woke up with chest pains, a familiar feeling I have experienced before. Immediately, I remembered I had fish for dinner. However, my past episodes of an allergic reaction to fish was only with tuna and salmon. I didn’t always have fish allergies, it took a long time after the first experience and many tests at the hospital, and some research of my own, before I realized I had an allergy.
I went to the kitchen, drank some water and chugged some Mylanta, hoping this would help. An hour went by and the pain did not go away and I started feeling nauseous with feelings of vomiting. This was new. In the past, I had some numbness in my hands and face along with a very severe acid reflux pain in my esophagus. I had the pain this time but no numbness.
I immediately started researching on the internet the fish I had for dinner, pollock. There were several sites, along with WebMD.com, that mentioned that pollock can affect some people.
Okay. That’s it. No more fish for me ever. Which sucks. I guess I should have researched it before I ate it.
After discovering this problem, I immediately woke up Chelby and told her to take me to the emergency room, thinking I was on my way toward anaphylactic shock. We got there just before 3:00 a.m. and waited to see the doctor, after checking in, for almost an hour and a half. Ridiculous. I failed to mention that on the way to the hospital that I was starting to feel loss of breath. By this time in the waiting room, it was getting worse and the nausea never left. I had mentioned this to the lady at the counter but it didn’t seem to rush things.
I finally saw the doctor. They put me on a EKG again, just in case there were heart issues being that I have those issues coming from my Mom’s side of the family. After they monitored this for a while, and my blood pressure, they eventual pumped me, via a needle in the arm, with Protonix, steroids and anti-histamine. The anti-histamine was enough to knock me out, which was perfect since they wanted to continue to monitor me.
They eventually released me around 7:30 a.m. and sent me home with prescriptions for my acid reflux, more steriods and more anti-histamine (Benadryl).
I stayed home from work today to recuperate. I’m feeling better now and so much more the wiser.
Dude – That’s frightening. I’m glad you are feeling better.
No fish for you!
Shag
Fish sucks anyways. Isn’t acid reflux fun? You might have to get an endoscopy, that was memorable.
Oh yeah. Been there, done that a long time ago.