What my husband said to the ultrasound tech
"She's had some difficult experiences"
I woke up at 1am yesterday with a burning sensation in my abdomen. It started near my sternum and radiated down, and within an hour it was so intense I couldn’t stop shaking and throwing up. By 9am, I was in the ER.
They ran a CT scan. An ultrasound. Drew labs. Gave me tramadol, which didn’t touch the pain. Then morphine, which didn’t come close either. After all of that? Everything came back normal. They sent me home, still in tremendous pain, where I fell asleep on my bathroom floor until my primary care doctor called in two prescriptions that finally brought relief.
Just a virus, it turns out. Acute gastritis (10/10 do not recommend). The same thing my ten-year-old had handled from the couch with a blanket and some Sprite. In adults, apparently, it stages a full revolt.
But that’s not what I want to write about.
A few hours before the ER, Bryan and I had gotten into a giant argument. Parenting stuff. The kind of disagreement that doesn’t resolve cleanly, where you both go your separate ways still holding your positions, still frustrated. Knowing for certain you are right and the other is dead wrong (and just genuinely awful). Parenting teens is fun, guys. Anyway, that all doesn’t matter.
What matters is what happened later.
