Health update
I have been very slowly deteriorating. Man... I'm out of breath. Whew. That's a long driveway. Dang. When did one flight of stairs have so many steps? Shit, I'll just wear loafers, shoestrings are for losers.
Like that.
I can't say, oh, it was xyz date and then the shit hit the fan. But... bending over to tie my shoes, I would pant and heave like I was being chased. And I felt like I'd heroically overindulged at the Thanksgiving Dinner of the Gods! I felt so full... but... I hadn't really eaten a lot. I thought, well, shit. I have a football sized tumor just over my belly. It's crushing my lungs. That's why I can't take a full breath. And I was a little wheezy/bubbly in my breathing. Not much of a cough.
Monday a week ago, I took a bath in the middle of the night and that made the breathing much easier. But when I came back to bed and laid down on my back, I felt like I was being choked. Like an invisible hand was gripping my throat. Like a heavy, sodden wet towel was doubled over and laid across my neck I panted and gasped for minutes, I couldn't catch my breath. From laying the fuck down in bed.
If I'm gonna keel over and die in bed from overexertion you can be sure it will be with a happy ending. None of this dying from pulling the blankey up to my chin bullshit. So, Tuesday I agreed to see the urgent care office after work.
They sucked.
They made me wait a really long time, they communicated less than the average goldfish, and then said, we can not do anything for you, so I called ahead to the emergency room across the street for you. ?!?!? wtf? You have someone to take you right? No, let me out of here dumbass. Clearly I had that mind/body synchronization thing in full effect.
So off to the ER. They're much nicer, much more involved. I had an EKG, an electrocardiogram, which, let me tell you, sounds a lot more interesting that it is to experience It takes a couple minutes to open the packages of and apply the little adhesive terminals, ten seconds to do the test, then another couple minutes making bald patches in the shape of little adhesive terminals. I wasn't super hairy when I got there and I was less hairy when I left. Fortunately, the underwhelming EKG meant that there was nothing interesting about my heart, electrically speaking.
Off to the xray suite. The technician asked if I wanted to ride, I begged him to let me retain this last shred of my dignity, so we walked. He's a nice guy. But I have "really long lungs" and it took him about four tries with each view front and side to get the whole lung on the "film". Take a deep breath, now hold it, ... beep OK. Develop/digitize, rinse, repeat.
Back to my ER bench/bed/cooling board. Lots of people came in briefly, it seems, take some blood, take some measurements, make sure I wasn't too well covered up with that "gown". One fellow came in to take me to the CAT scan suite. He was really nice even though he wouldn't let me walk. We talked, he liked to talk, turns out he teaches a course(s) at the local college for radiology technicians, including how to run this machine. He's been doing it for 37 years. I felt I was in good hands. The CAT scan is a torus shaped machine that has a set of imaging devices along the ring of the torus which rotates at 120 rpm. It takes many pictures of your insides as your body moves along a line normal to the plane of rotation. Your body moves on a low carriage through the hole in the doughnut as the cameras in the doughnut take many pictures while you move. The pictures are "assembled" much like a still camera takes multiple exposures to create a panoramic picture. The images of a CAT scan are stitched together to make "slices" of your insides, and the computer can do it in all three axes, and give the viewer a chance to "move" through the slices. It's really cool. One specific purpose of my CAT scan was to see how my blood was moving, or not moving. This was accomplished by injecting me with dye that was opaque to the radiation and then moving me through the machine. Where the dye flowed in my blood, the radiation would be blocked and appear white on the final image. Knowing where I SHOULD have blood flowing meant they could compare what they saw with what they expected and deduce if I had a blockage somewhere. To my knowledge, they did not find any blockages.
Nor from the blood tests where the presence of certain enzymes can reveal blood clots--none of those either. Some enzymes found in my blood were slightly elevated, enzymes that are present when the heart is stressed. No shit. But the cause of this stress is still unknown. Only a procedure where the use a catheter in my arteries and burrow their way to my heart will they be able to find out if the cause was exertion (probably, hopefully) or some partial or complete blockage, which would be bad. At that time, a stent would be deployed at the location of the blockage to re-enlarge the occluded portion of my blood vessel. But, that's in the future.
They brought me some medicine in a little syringe about the size of my pinkie finger, they pumped three of them into the rig attached to my right arm.
This was furosemide, trade name Lasix. You can read about it at the link, the take away is that it is a powerful diuretic. After those three little shots I peed three times for a total of 2500 ml in a little over half an hour. That stuff does not mess around. You had better have a clear path to the toilet, the urine is on the way. I was being wrung out, and that is a good thing. The other end of this process is my fluid intake. At first I thought they were just being inconsiderate, "No, you can't have a drink of water, how about a nice little cup of ice?" The fluid restriction started then before I even knew it, and they were very strict about it. I spent the next two days being thirsty most of the time.
Next came an ECG, and echocardiogram. A sonogram of my working heart, just like you see where the doctor applies the gel to belly of a pregnant woman to show the fetus. Mine was higher, though there was an uncomfortable similarity of bellies. The ECG in the ER was just a quickie, I would have a formal one in the hospital later--spoiler alert--this is what conclusively determined the kind and degree of my congestive heart failure.
Congestive heart failure. That's what the guy told me, right there in the little ER room. I was gutted, shattered. WTF? I'm not dead yet! Heart. Failure. What a fucking gut punch.
I have had my share of sadness in my life, but this really affected me. I can see now that it was mostly the combination my knuckleheaded delusion that "I can't be sick, I'm just a little out of breath from being fat."; and of my different understanding of the phrase "heart failure", as a layman, compared to the doctor, a professional. I had an understanding of those words in the vernacular, but he was using them in a very specific medical context. As you can tell, I have recovered from my shock, but I promise you, it was a blow.
I should say that Twil met me at the urgent care place and followed me to the ER across the street. I didn't have any of my communication tools, but she did and thankfully got in touch with my kids. They were surprised and worried, but I reassured them. She stayed with me the whole time in the ER and she and her daughter got all the cars home, about ten miles away. The hospital was much closer to the house.
After that short, sharp shock, there was a lot of waiting around, more urinating, more waiting, more checking in on me and then finally a ride to the hospital. Those ambulance drivers all decked out in their tactical looking gear. Young guys, friendly, but not friendly enough to drive through Wendy's or Jack-In-The-Box. Bastards. I told them my treat! I was hungry. Whatever. They didn't drop me or stab me or "accidentally" take me to the morgue, so, I guess they're ok.
In the hospital now, about... midnight I guess. I was surprisingly alert as my regular bedtime is around ten pm. More machines that go ping, I had to surrender my pocket knife and my leatherman. One man's tool is another bureaucrat's WEAPON. I got a little claim ticket after signing away who the fuck knows what I signed. They gave me some scrubs bottoms like pajamas, size large. Child's large. I managed to get the waistband almost halfway up my thighs before they relented and let me have a grown up pair (which didn't stay on while I slept--too restrictive). Still lying down-ish, those hospital beds have a lot of adjustments. I got an IV drip and a blood pressure cuff and a blood-oxygen meter. Imagine the least convenient combination of locations for where to plug that stuff in, into the wall and into me, then separate those locations by the hospital bed with balky brakes. I had shit draped across me all the time, tubes, hoses, leads, wires, grrrr. I wound up holding the umbilical with my left hand against the rail so that any movement by my right hand wouldn't be brought up short by the IV stand. It worked out but it was awkward.
I did see a doctor for about five minutes, the one that was on duty I suppose and he explained what would be happening. Observation, more tests, especially that ECG, interpretation of the results of those tests, rinse, repeat. The nurses finally decided that I didn't represent a threat to their safety or their attendance to their appointed rounds and let me be. For a couple hours at a stretch, at least. The kitchen was closed but the nurse took pity on me and brought me green jello. Nom.
Time for some shuteye (until the next post).