For the last couple of weeks or so, I was beginning to notice a gradual and progressive impairment to my breathing, and was getting interrupted sleep; sometimes drenched with intense night sweats. I started to notice things, like for instance, that while I was cycling to work, it felt like I was dragging an anchor behind me: using three times as much energy, yet going two times slower. I dismissed it as perhaps a cold coming on, yet I wasn't coughing or sneezing; just panting and wheezing. My energy seemed to decline dramatically and fizzle out earlier and earlier each day throughout the course of a week. When this past Monday came around, my breathing seemed even more stifled, my heart was pounding uncomfortably and uncontrollably, and the strange pressure I was feeling in my chest seemed to intensify exponentially after just a short stint of walking the dog, and a climb up the flight of stairs to my home.
It was a strange and unique form of pressure in my chest that registered in my mind, but not anything that I would have immediately identified or compared with in my own personal mental inventory of sensations of what I already knew of as "pain". Because it was more like simple discomfort and less like "pain" to me, I dissuaded myself from seeing a doctor earlier on, thinking that I would probably just be turned away, and then have "paranoid hypochondriac" stamped into my medical file.* After all, I reasoned, I just had a physical six weeks earlier and was given a reasonably clean bill of health. This time though, the discomfort prevailed a little too long and was really strong in magnitude at that time. There was even more breathing impairment along with the beginning of shakiness and feeling like my legs were going to buckle out from under me. It was a definite sign that things were taking a turn for the worse. I was prompted then to follow up on my friend's advice to see my family doctor to at least get a referral to see an allergist, or a respiration specialist to see if I acquired something like asthma. I just learned recently through a first aid class about what the signs for a heart attack were, and I didn't sense any of what I thought were the supposed internal symptoms of one. What I experienced accorded more with what I learned about as the symptoms associated with asthma. I drove nine kilometres to my doctor's clinic. It was a foolish thing to do in retrospect, because I could have passed out at any moment. I staggered from the parking lot, through their front door, to the reception. I was breathing as fully and deeply as I could, feeling my lungs fill to full capacity, and yet I felt like I was totally suffocating. I saw my doctor, who then rigged me up to an electrocardiogram to read my heart rhythms. Then, before I knew it, an ambulance was being dispatched for me to take me to a hospital emergency ward.
After several hours of waiting for a CT scan, I used much of that time watching my heartrate readout on the monitor being unable to sink below 110 beats per minute, despite the fact that I was lying down still and immobile. Any movement I made caused it to spike even higher yet. It lowered once they hooked up a blood-thinner IV and oxygen line on me. I finally received my CT scan results, and the good news was that they concluded that I did not actually have a heart attack (although I came close to it). The bad news however was that they discovered that I had pulmonary embolisms in, not just one, but both of my lungs. They can be as deadly as a heart attack if they aren't caught in time and treated. I suppose I managed to get some sense to get to the doctor just in the nick of time. I am lucky that my heart has had a bit of seasoning and conditioning through my running days, or else I really think that if it was just even a little bit weaker and unable to handle all this extra stress and punishment, I'm sure that I would have died that day.
It's fairly straight forward to understand what pulmonary embolisms are and what they can do. I'm not wasting time and energy to explain any further details about it. Use a search engine if you are curious and want to know about such things; you'll get a better explanation. What I don't understand yet however is the how and why of my particular case. I'm still struggling to process all of this onslaught of information now nearly a week after all this happened. The medical team working with me is just as mystified as I am as to how a person with my particular health and history could even ever have acquired such a condition in the first place. It would be something in which the people who I serve would be statistically far more likely to get rather than myself. I'm still slotted for a series of additional tests on an outpatient basis to figure out what's going on, and thus I have nothing more to say about my progress: except that for now I've been deemed well enough to be home, and recovery is going too slow far my liking. I'm pacing around indoors now, albeit very slowly, as my only exercise to promote better circulation in my limbs and body to prevent blood from pooling and creating more clots, even though the doctors currently seem to think that this wasn't a factor for me.
The most unnerving things for me about all of this are as follows:
- Even though I'm set on taking the right path in treatment for them and trying to not let them grow more, the clots still have a potential to shift, dislodge, and migrate as they began to shrink and loosen up. They then may potentially move to block vessels that feed blood in the lung tissue itself, causing pulmonary infarction and subsequent necrosis (death of tissues) in the lung, or else cause blockage and damage to other more vital bodily organs. It comes to my realization that it's like I've had a time bomb wired into my chest, and the only means I have to defuse it are anticoagulant medications, extra vigilance, and having a constantly charged cell phone nearby for a 911 call. I have no idea yet as to how long that it will take to clear this up, if it is clearing that is. It angers and disappoints me somewhat that I have been proactive in trying to stay healthy, and this still ends up being the result of it.
- The extreme limitations put on the amount of physical activity I can do within a day. My life has been turned upside down. Simply taking a small bag of garbage out thoroughly exhausted me yesterday. I caught myself on a couple more times being too light-headed after doing what seemed to be very little, and had to sit down immediately before I got so dizzy and could have passed out. It's frustrating to have all this time off, yet so little energy and ability to make what I would call good use of it. I'm still overwhelmed with uncertainty as to what this will mean for me in terms of future travel, energy, and time needed to deal with this problem alone. I'm also bothered by what this will mean for me in terms of possible future loss of work and income.
- A new routine of having to be dependent on medication. It's not just some simple pills either, but stuff that needs constant dosage correction and regular sessions of blood work to do it, and using other junk that I have to give myself through daily injections.
- What bothers me most now is the loss of some of my independence. Perhaps one reason that I'm not a good candidate for marriage, co-habiting with someone, or having a lasting romantic relationship is because I don't seem to respond or react well to being pampered, coddled, or asking and getting help for stuff that I should damn well know how to do myself. I really don't have the right words to describe the reasons, it's complicated. I'm just not used to asking for favours from anyone. Now, I'm put in a spot where I'm left to impose upon and trouble people to do chores with heavy lifting/exertion, or other errands for me. Worse yet is getting people involved in fixing up my stupid mistakes I have made and should be responsible for, like fetching a pair of my glasses for me that I had forgotten back at the hospital. I'm finding this role reversal of going from a helper to helpee a very difficult one to adjust to.
Today, my mission and ambition is to start walking the dog again for one time outside today. I have been given instructions by my medical team to limit my range within my surrounding block. It's sort of a place where I'm picking up from last Monday to work towards some normalcy. We'll see how life goes on from there.
*- A doctor, in my mind, is someone I see once or twice every year for a physical for taking preventative measures, or else for any other time when I feel real "pain" . . . that's it. As nice a guy as he is to see and chat with, I don't make it a habit to run to my clinic every time I feel "discomfort", or else I'd be there once or twice every bloody week.
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