Day 17: My First Ambulance Ride – 30 days, 30 episodes

I'm Matt Gilhooly, and this is the Life Shift. Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. Hello, my friends.

Welcome to day 17 of 30 days, 30 episodes of the Life Shift podcast. If this is your first time listening, there are 16 other days before this, and then there will be a bunch of other days after this.

And it's really been quite a journey of challenging myself to show up every day, be present in the moment, choose a prompt to talk about, tell you something, whatever it might be, edit it, release it all within a short amount of time.

And so this has been a great challenge, and I really kind of like it, and I don't know how I can continue it moving forward in a way that will feel very similar, but hopefully you are enjoying this as well. It is kind of like the writing challenge that people do in November.

People that are writing novels have this, like, novel writing challenge, and every day they write a certain amount of words. So decided to make that a podcast version, which other people have done before.

So I'm not creating something new here, but I wanted to create something for the Life Shift that was a little bit new, a little bit more about me, a little less about the guests, which you will hear every single week. As I mentioned yesterday, I have recorded 166 episodes, so that means I think I'm through the third week in January of 2025, which is super cool.

And I have a couple more scheduled right now, and then obviously, I will be scheduling more as they come in.

As I've mentioned before, I am so lucky that people recommend others to be a guest on my show or people pitch themselves, or I have agencies that pitch themselves. Some of those are not so, but a lot of them are really great.

So if you're one of them and you're listening, thank you for knowing what the show is about, knowing the way that I like to approach these conversations on the Life Shift. I got such a kind message from one of the guests that I recorded with recently.

The other day, they reached out and just said how wonderful they felt the conversation was, and they really felt like it aligned with their purpose, and they complimented me. It was just, like, so kind, and it just reminds me of why I do this show.

And, you know, maybe it's not going to reach a million in people like some other podcasts, but hopefully it reaches the right people.

And if nothing else, hopefully these conversations are both healing for me, which I know they are, but also for the guests when they get to share their story. So hopefully we're doing good things in the world. Hopefully you agree.

I'm just going to keep saying hopefully, and then it's going to sound really awkward, so you're welcome. All right, so day 17. Not quite sure what I was going to talk about.

Have my list next to me, and one of the questions is about any kind of emergencies that you've ever faced in your life. So I have, in my adult life, been to the emergency room twice, and then an urgent care twice. And those have all been in the last, like, 15 years.

So I guess I'll just share those moments. So I don't like seeing blood, especially my own blood, leaving my body.

And so growing up, I had this challenge of, like, having to get blood work done, and it would make me queasy, and then I would worry about. And then I would look, and then it would just be like this spiral downhill. But I should get my blood work done. Every year.

I have history of cancer in my family, and so my blood work can tell me whether or not certain cancers are growing. So that would be prostate cancer. And I'm getting closer to the age in which family members were diagnosed, and so I just need to keep up with that.

But I've been doing that since the family members were diagnosed, and so it's been a while. So anyway, about. I think it was 2012, I was getting regular routine blood work done at LabCorp, which I don't go to anymore, and you'll know why.

But I went in, and I always let the phlebotomist know that I'm not so great at getting the blood work and I'm not going to look and whatnot.

And I think this particular time, maybe it was someone that was a little bit new or impatient or something, but essentially, I probably wasn't as hydrated as I should have been, but she couldn't find the vein in my arm. And then she put in the needle, and she started moving the needle around, which then started moving, like, the tendons in my arm around a little bit.

And I certainly started to get a little bit queasy. So I told her, and I said, I'm not feeling so great. So she.

This was one of those high chairs that they put you in, you know, and normally they put the. The padded bar down so that you can put your arm out or you can slump over if you need to. Well, this time she didn't put that bar down.

And she said, here, drink this water. I'll be back in five minutes and we'll try again.

And I Guess she came back at some point, but I don't recall because I went unconscious in that chair and fell headfirst to the floor, cracking my head open and breaking some teeth in the process. And I remember waking up and my head was, like, essentially on her lap because she had come back in the room trying to wake me up.

And I remember, like, feeling little pieces of my teeth in my mouth. And I remember there being, like, blood on my pants. And I don't know exactly how I fell or any of those pieces, but essentially I was injured.

And she didn't get any of the blood work, so they had to call the emt. And they took my blood pressure when they got there, and it was like, 77 over 40. And I was like, I'm fine. Don't worry.

I'll just, like, drive myself home. It'll be fine. They're like, sir, we can't let you do that, so we're going to have to take you. I was like, just give me a couple of minutes.

I'll be fine. It'll recover. And so they checked it again a couple minutes later, and it wasn't much better.

So they're like, you have to get on this gurney, and we have to wheel you out and we have to take you to the hospital. And I was like, well, can I just walk out to the ambulance? They're like, no, you need to lay on the gurney.

And I was like, oh, God, this has to go through the waiting room. And so then I was like, well, can you, like, put the sheet over my head so that people don't see me?

And they're like, that would kind of give the wrong idea. People might think that you're dead. Which I was more embarrassed than anything else.

And so that was my first ride in an ambulance, and it took me to the hospital, and then I had. It was in the er and they did, like, CAT scans to make sure I was fine and probably was just a concussion of some sort.

And then they had to do the stitches into my forehead up here, which ended up looking like a Harry Potter scar. But when I was getting those stitches done, the ER attending doctor or nurse or whoever it was was like, oh, I've never used sutures this small.

And I'm thinking, not something that you probably want to share out loud with with these folks that are getting their heads stitched up for the first time. But in any case, I was fine and very surprisingly, was like, okay, how do I get back to my car? Because you brought me here in an ambulance.

And now you're just letting me walk out of the E.R. they're like, you can call a cab if you want. And this was before Ubers were really big. And so I called all my friends. Everyone was in a work meeting.

Nobody would be able to answer or come pick me up. So I just started walking back to my car.

And that gave me the time to call the dentist and make an appointment to get seen so that I could get my teeth fixed. And by the time I got about a mile and a half down the road, a friend of mine was able to pick me up and take me back to the office or to my car.

And then I went to the office, and then I went home and did what I needed to do. And lots of bills later. I mean, if I hadn't burned my teeth, it wouldn't have been as bad.

It would have just been the emergency room co pay, and then my co pay for the ambulance was like $6 or something like that. I ended up trying to get the money back from LabCorp, and they said it was my fault, and that's kind of the reason I don't go back to LabCorp.

It's not really the event, but the fact that they said it was my fault for standing up or trying to get up or something like that, when I know full well I was unconscious before leaving the chair because I didn't have any pain. And I think that's kind of your pain receptors kind of turn off when you get a little unconscious, or so Dr. Google tells me.

So that was my first experience that I can remember as an adult in the ER myself. My first time in an ambulance. And then, like, I think 2019, maybe 2019, I had to take myself to the.

To the ER because I was not dehydrated, but my internal organs were dehydrated, and it kept giving me these heart pains. And I thought I was having a heart attack. And so lots of tests later, that was quite an experience. But I drove myself there.

Another one of those instances in which they're like, okay, you can go home now. Oh, just kidding. You can't, because you drove here. Because they had just given me some kind of, like, morphine drip of some sort to ease the pain.

But that was. That was all fine. You know, I survived that one as well. But those were my two major, major. I don't know, two of my emergency room visits.

I've been lucky. I've never had to stay over in a hospital as an adult. I have had to go to the urgent clinic a few times I sliced my finger open cleaning the shower.

One time the flippers of this house did not sand down the edges of the tile. And if you don't know, unfinished edge of a tile is kind of like a giant thick razor blade.

So that happened and then I got like some kind of finger infection in which I had to go to emergency care. I broke my finger. I broke my toe recently, but I didn't take myself. So these are my emergency room visits.

I don't know why that I am sharing this this time. I'm sure other people have had some crazy scary events in an emergency room. I've been lucky.

I really haven't broken anything major besides a finger and a toe. And I haven't had to go to the emergency room for anything like that.

Just normal routine blood work, you know, and just I guess not hydrating enough in some capacity. I guess like both of those are just not hydrating enough. So maybe I just need to drink more water.

In any case, there's my little fact of Matt for the day. Nothing too exciting today, but here I am sharing on the 17th day in a row.

No breaks showing up on the day of not going to do any of these beforehand, even if it's a really busy day. So that is what I am sharing for day 17.

I will be back tomorrow for day 18 and I have this long list of there's 404 questions on this list that I found on Reddit. So maybe I will find one of those and talk about that tomorrow.

So thank you for being along on this journey and if you have any good ideas or you have a question that you want me to address, shoot that over to me on social media at the Life Shift Podcast. Or you can email me at Matt the life shift podcast.com so that's it for now. I will see you tomorrow. Have a great Sunday evening.

For more information please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.