(no subject)
So, today is the one-year “anniversary” of my hospitalization for a pulmonary embolism last year. A pulmonary embolism, for those of you playing along - and I had no idea what it was, until I had one - is a blood clot in your lung. It’s not good, it hurts like a motherfucker, and it can kill you.
It is easily the most pain I’ve ever been in/can imagine ever being in. There were points where I literally just wanted to die so it wouldn’t hurt anymore. The first time I went to the hospital was at 3am on the night of the 10th. It didn’t occur to me to call an ambulance, so I walked. Through west Philadelphia, at 3am, in 15 degree weather through the ice and the snow. Even my mom’s secretary yelled at me about that later. To be fair, I only live about 6 blocks from the nearest hospital, and I was delirious from the pain.
The ER docs took an X-ray of my lungs, but they said everything looked normal and sent me home with Tylenol with Codeine and told me I had probably pulled a muscle. In retrospect, all I can say is: seriously? I told them it was the worst pain I had ever felt, and what they come up with is “pulled muscle”? I could barely get words out I was in so much pain, and these brilliant doctors suggested that I had pulled a muscle. Unimpressive. Needless to say, the Tylenol didn’t work. I spent the whole day taking the Tylenol as often as I could, which would knock me out for an hour before the pain got so bad that it would wake me up again, and I’d be in agony for another 2 hours before I could take more drugs.
At some point in the afternoon, the nurse practitioner from the hospital called me and told me I needed to come back in. A radiologist had looked at my X-ray, and they thought it might be a pulmonary embolism. When I told my mom, she flipped out. I still didn’t know what it meant, so I toddled on back to the hospital, where they immediately hooked me up to strong pain medication, which made me more serene. They took me up to do a CAT scan of my chest, confirmed that it was a pulmonary embolism, and admitted me. There was some crying involved, and a fretful mother who immediately booked a plane ticket to fly up to Philadelphia, and some frantic emails sent from my phone to the dean of students at the law school asking if he could please tell my professors what was going on. It was the first day of the spring semester.
The nurses were giving me hits of the pain meds whenever I asked for them. It turned out not to be such a great thing, because apparently opiate pain medication can shut down your respiratory system. I woke up in the middle of the night with the whole world tilting and swimming, with a room full of nurses freaking out. They injected me with something - what’s that drug they give heroin addicts when they overdose? - and all of a sudden, all the beautiful pain medication was gone, and my body went into shock. They tried to hook me up to oxygen because I was hyperventilating, but the little thing wouldn’t stay in my nose cos I was shaking so badly, so they gave me an oxygen mask, and that’s the last thing I remember. From then on, they would only let me have Percoset every six hours. Strict schedule. That meant a lot more discomfort.
Because of the negative reaction that first night, they kept me in the hospital another two days. They had me on an IV to help break up the clot, and then I started getting intramuscular injections every day to speed up the process. I don’t really remember a lot of what else happened. My mom showed up on the second day and stayed for a week. I spent most of that week in my bed in my apartment, still in a lot of pain and completely incapable of dealing with the world. For my first foray out into the world again, we went to Reading Terminal Market and had an Amish breakfast.
When I went back to school, people didn’t know what had happened. One of my friends had assumed I had been off skiing in the Alps or something. My Constitutional Law professor called on me on my first day back in his class, which made me cry for the next 10 minutes. To say I was fragile would be a massive understatement. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the semester, but I came out the other end with straight As after all was said and done.
I went to Jordan two months after the pulmonary embolism. I had signed up to go, and no one in the law school realized it might be a bad idea until 3 or 4 days before we were set to leave. I had to fight with the school to let me go, and I told them, “If you’re not going to outright forbid me to go, then I’m going.” They didn’t outright forbid me, so I went. I had decided that I wasn’t going to let this thing stop me from doing the things I wanted to do in law school. I was terrified - long plane flights can prompt blood clots - but I went anyway. Nothing happened.
Two months after that, I went to Uganda. I had found the one clinic in all of Kampala that could do the weekly blood tests I needed to get done. So I went, and I went to the clinic every week, and I got the blood tests. When I got really sick at the end of June and my blood test results spiraled out of control, I panicked a little bit. There was some more crying, and I thought about going home, but I stuck it out and it was fine.
My treatment ended in September. I had the full blood workup then, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with me, or anything to explain why I got the clot in the first place. It’s just one of those things that happens. Today I heard someone say, “Healthy 25-year-olds don’t buy health insurance because they don’t need it,” and I wanted to interrupt and say, “But you never know.” Because fuck if I had any idea that this was going to happen. But it did, and God willing it won’t happen again, and well… happy one-year anniversary to me.