Yesterday, for a change, I went to the Hudson Valley Hospital emergency room. No, there's nothing seriously wrong with me. But I did pass out a couple of times and Jenny insisted that I go.

I woke up at around 6:30 with some abdominal pains - probably gas or something, but I was kind of freaked out by it at the time. I would have just gone back to sleep, but I kind of felt the need to go to the bathroom so I got up to do so.

Next thing I knew I was lying on the bathroom floor and Jenny was standing over me yelling at me. When I realized where I was, I thought "wow. must have passed out. I'd better get back into bed." So I told Jenny I was ok, got up and started to go to bed and... I was on the floor again and I could hear Jenny in the other room calling for an ambulance.

I yelled out and told her to stop - I really didn't want to get dragged into an ambulance. I got up again and made it into bed this time. She brought me a couple of glasses of water to drink, and at this point I was feeling a lot better.

Jenny, however, was still pretty freaked out. She kept trying to convince me to go to an emergency room. After some consideration, I agreed that this was probably a good idea - I've passed out before, but never so abruptly, and there was a chance that there might be something seriously wrong. So I let her take me to Hudson Valley Hospital's ER.

They gave me all kinds of tests - blood, EKG, chest X-ray, CT-scan. Everything came back negative - nothing to see here. By about noon, the doctor on duty decided I was in no immediate danger and was ready to be rid of me. I asked him if there was any way I could get the images from the CT-scan: "If I could just get the raw data, that'd be great!" He replied that "they usually just make a disk, I'll ask them."

We had to stop back later for the disk. I was wondering what the image format would be, turned out to be a proprietary format - DICOM. There was viewing software for Windows on the disk, but I was able to find a converter for Linux. End result is, I was able to put together this nifty animated GIF of the inside of my head:

I think some of the more complex pictures in the series have excellent potential as a background for this site. I'll have to mess around with them in Gimp. I figure those pictures will probably end up costing me about 2 grand, so I might as well get the most out of them.

I have an appointment to see a cardiologist on Thursday as a follow-up. I don't expect her to find anything wrong with me. Sometimes shit just happens because it's time for it to happen. I have several ugly burns and gashes on my right arm, a bump on my forehead, a bruise on the bridge of my nose, and my neck is really sore. All of these injuries occurred during my two falls, beyond this stuff (and the soreness in my left arm from the tetnis shot they gave me) I feel fine.

Of course, Jenny has informed her entire support network of this incident, so I now have people I don't even know worried about me. I really hate it when people make a fuss over me. I know their intentions are good, but the fact is I don't have very much to say about this incident other than what I've recorded here, and I probably wouldn't have even written this entry but to show off my animated CT-scan.

So if you're reading this: please don't ask me about it. I'll write another entry as soon as I know anything further. Until then, just assume that I'm doing fine. That's what I'm assuming ;-).