It's 3:30 am and I'm lying in an ER bed with a blood clot in my lung. A crazy guy two beds over is singing at the nurses. Gina is convinced she draws the crazy. She's not wrong.
Three hours ago I was fine. Or I thought I was. I'd been short of breath for a couple of days — I figured it was the altitude, maybe a chest cold, maybe just the fact that I'd been sitting in airports for the better part of a week. You tell yourself things. You're good at it by the time you're my age.
My chest started hurting around midnight. Not the dramatic movie-heart-attack kind of hurting. More like someone had their knee on my sternum and wasn't planning to move it anytime soon. I sat with it for an hour before I admitted to myself that this was probably a hospital situation.
Photo — hospital room, equipment, or related image
What they found
They ran the blood panel, did a chest X-ray, then a CT scan with contrast. The contrast dye goes in warm, you feel it spread down through your body, and there's a moment where you think you've wet yourself. You haven't. Nobody warns you about this. It should be on a sign.
The ER doctor came back with the results. Bilateral pulmonary embolism — blood clots in both lungs. Not one lung. Both. I stared at her. She had a very calm way of saying things that should not be said calmly.
She asks if I want another Hydrocodone or perhaps Morphine instead. Morphine, ugh. I hate the stuff, the feeling it gives as it's pushed in and the instant stupid feeling that comes over me. The Hydrocodone just makes me not care about the pain and lets me sleep. I'll take that, thanks.
They admitted me immediately. I spent the next four days in a hospital bed with a basket of blood vials on the nightstand and an IV drip of Heparin running into my arm. The crazy singing guy two beds over turned out to be a recurring character — apparently 3:30 am is his performing hour.
The part nobody talks about
Everyone is very focused on the clot itself. On the drugs, the INR levels, the follow-up scans. Nobody talks much about what it does to your head. There's a specific kind of quiet terror that sets in when you understand, really understand, that your body tried to kill you without asking permission or giving you any useful warning signs.
I'm not a dramatic person. I don't do catastrophizing. But lying there at 4 am with a monitoring sensor on my finger, watching my oxygen saturation number, I had a very honest conversation with myself about how dumb I'd been to sit on this for two days.
What I actually learned
Shortness of breath that doesn't make sense — meaning you're not running, you're not at altitude, you have no obvious explanation — is a reason to call someone. Chest pain that isn't going away after an hour is a reason to call someone. Both at the same time is a reason to stop negotiating with yourself and get in a car.
I got lucky. This is a story I get to tell because I got lucky. The gnarly old guy broke, got put back together, and came out of it with a prescription for blood thinners and a slightly lower tolerance for the stupid stories we tell ourselves about why we're fine.
That's the version I'm writing down. The broken version. Because the only thing more useless than a health scare is a health scare you don't learn anything from.