/dev/zero

Dad’s in the hospital tonight.
We went out and got Mom a wireless network card (Netgear WP54g) yesterday to replace the HPNA card she has, but it was DOA. I put it in her computer and it refused to boot. Wouldn’t even POST. I tried it in my computer and it did the same thing. So after church today, Dad and I took it back to Microcenter and got a Linksys card instead. I stuck it in and Mom’s computer would POST, but then give a “Parity Check 1 0000″ error. In my computer, it wouldn’t even POST. So back to Microcenter we go for a 3rd time, and this time we pick up a USB wireless adaptor (Belkin). As we’re walking away from the service desk and heading back to the car, Dad tells me he’s feeling some pressure in his chest. We get in the car and start driving for home. About 3 blocks later, Dad starts fiddling with the GPS navigation system, which is odd since we’re just going straight home and he knows the way. I ask what he’s looking up and he tells me the nearest hospital. Then he calls Mom from his cell phone to let her know and we go to Richardson Regional Medical Center.
Boy the check-in person pissed me off. We walk in and the first station is the cashier. That alone struck me as rather odd. So we go to the an available cashier, she asks what we need, Dad says he’s having chest pressure and fears it may be a heart attack. She asks him to be seated and tells us to wait a minute while she finishes up taking care of another patient’s paperwork. She spends several minutes doing that, then comes back to us and spends 10 minutes getting Dad’s name, SSN, drivers license, insurance card, initial here, here, here and here, sign here and here… I’m thinking “My god, he may be having a heart attack and the first thing you’re worried about is the billing! Where’s the triage nurse? Take care of triage first, THEN worry about whether or not you’re bloody getting paid!” Then when she finished with her stuff, she had him go back and sit down in the waiting room.
Luckily it was less than 5 minutes after that before a nurse was out with a wheel chair to take him back to be evaluated.
Once they got him to an exam area, things went pretty quick. Got him wired up right away and the monitor looked pretty good (to my layman’s eyes). Normal heart rhythm, good blood ox, normal BP. They drew some blood and sent it up to the lab, took a chest x-ray, then had to quickly wheel his bed into another room as the Richardson Fire Dept. was bringing in a severe case and they needed the “severe trauma” room we were in.
The rest of the day / evening passed pretty slowly, with different nurses coming in to check on him, the ER doc coming back once to check on him, then Dad’s regular doctor showed up to check on him. The blood tests came back negative for the various cardiac enzymes and what not they look for that indicate a heart attack. The pressure, slight nausea and shortness of breath he described, we were told were non-specific symptoms. They COULD indicate a heart attack or other cardiac distress, or they could be symptoms of something else. It is a case of “we can’t positively conclude you DID have a heart attack, but we can’t positively conclude you didn’t.” so they’re keeping him overnight for observation. They’ll take blood tests a couple more times to check for cardiac enzymes and have a cardiologist do a stress test in the morning to check for angina. With luck he’ll be back home tomorrow afternoon.