I am in the US, so financial calculations need to be factored in.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, felt like I was going to die, then vomitted.
Now heart beating slightly off, not feeling great but not terrible, had mild chest pain earlier in evening…
Kinda feel off. Have medical insurance with large deductible.
Ignore it? Taxi to ER? Call 911? Genuinely don’t know and don’t like 911 since police are involved.
Also I feel hot, feel burning around my neck.
Hope you’re doing better now. As someone who works in the medical field, it can be a real bitch to navigate everything.
For the future: Nobody here knows your baseline. If you tell any clinical medical worker you have had chest pain followed by difficulty breathing and vomiting they’re very likely to tell you to go to the ED/ER (Emergency Department / Room). Speaking for myself only, that would depend how stable I feel following the vomiting incident and if the chest pain persisted, and baseline conditions and history (e.g., do you have a history of hypertension, high cholesterol, overweight, etc.? When was your last physical exam?).
We also don’t know the full context on what you mean by couldn’t breathe and feeling like you could die. For example, did you have a major GERD / Acid-Reflux incident (could explain mild chest pain)? Did you eat something and have an allergic anaphylactic reaction followed by a surge of adrenaline from your fear of death and a panic attack followed by vomiting? Have you had sinus congestion say from a cold and a glob of postnasal drip obstructing your airways? Do you take drugs? And yes, it’s possible you also had a heart attack.
Worth noting: Urgent Care has limited resources beyond an X-ray machine, usually. The moment you mention chest pain, they’ll hook you up to an ECG to take a reading. If your vital signs are okay (blood pressure, SPO2, heart-rate, temperature) and your ECG reads no active heart attack, then they might just refer you to a cardiologist follow-up. If on the other hand there are signals of a recent or active heart attack, they will pretty much demand you get loaded up into an ambulance and send you to the nearest hospital with a cath lab (due to liability on themselves). You’ll thus be triple-dipping costs from urgent care, ambulance, and hospital when you might’ve been better off going straight to the ER.
ER will be a higher co-pay with insurance and absurdly costly without (but there are options, some ethical some not surrounding this). The good news is unlike Urgent Care, they cannot refuse treatment based on lack of insurance, if that’s your predicament. Urgent Care will.
Also when you call 911 for a medical emergency, police aren’t going to be involved. ACAB rhetoric aside, DO NOT REFUSE TO CALL 911 BECAUSE OF THIS. The moment the dispatcher sees this is a medical emergency, nearby fire departments or ambulances will be notified.