Hospitals are way cooler on Grey's Anatomy

On Wednesday night we had a bit of a scare. Kristian had a fairly severe allergic reaction and I ended up having to take him to the emergency room.

He noticed around 1pm on Wednesday that the upper left side of his lip was swelling. He took some Benedryl, took a nap and when he woke up the right side of his upper lip was also now swelling. He took some more Benedryl. When I got home from work at 6pm I was shocked to see his upper lip which had now swollen massively. His upper lip looked like he had put one of those old school red, candy lips in his mouth. It was honestly that size and he looked like a freakish cartoon character. **We took pictures but he said I am not allowed to post them on the Internet, he's a bit embarassed** I said we should go to the hospital but he wanted to wait since he didn't feel bad and had no other symptoms. He took another Benedryl and we decided to wait a couple hours and see what happened.

Right around 8pm I made the executive decision that we needed to go see a doctor. His lip was continuing to swell and he was now getting hives on his stomach. I was afraid of his tongue swelling or his throat closing up. We tried the Urgent Care but they were closed already so then I took him straight to the hospital. We expected that we would have to wait several hours like most people do when they go to the E.R. but we walked in and they took one look at him and sent us back to an exam room. They were afraid of him going into anaphylatic shock and not being able to breathe.

Once in the room, they started an I.V. took blood and started him on medication. At one point there were 6 people in the room working on him. You would have thought he had been shot. It was a bit scary at that point because they seemed to be taking this very seriously so we worried something was really wrong.

It turns out he had a bad reaction to the blood pressure medication he's on. He's actually been taking it since Oct. but apparently with this medication, the main sign of a reaction is a swollen upper lip and it can happen randomly even if you've been on the medication for years. They knew right away what happened as soon as he told him what medicines he was on.

We waited in the exam room for a couple hours, while they monitored him. Fortunately there was  t.v. so we could watch American Idol at least. Around 10pm they said they wanted to admit him overnight so they could keep an eye on him. He got moved to a private room and was all settled in by 11:30pm and I went home to sleep.

Yesterday I went to the hospital around 10am and his swelling had gone down quite a bit but was still apparent, they said they would probably release him around 4pm. I went home at noon to eat lunch and check work emails. I headed back to the hospital at 3:30 and he looked remarkably better. By this point he was getting very ansy to go home. He felt fine and was sick of just laying around. We had to wait for the doctor to come and see him one last time which didn't finally happen until 5:30pm and then wait for the nurse to bring his discharge papers which didn't happen until close to 6:30pm. I think our payback for getting through the E.R. so quickly was having it take extra long to get released.

We finally made it home around 7pm last night and were both exhausted. He's much better and his lip is almost totally back to normal. They prescribed him a steroid and a different blood pressure medication.

It was definitely a scary experience thinking that if we hadn't gone to the hospital his reaction could have worsened to the point of him not being able to breathe in the middle of the night. You can't mess around with stuff like that. The staff at the hospital did a great job and I'm very thankful he's okay.