From Little Treasure

Have you ever been in a situation where you fantasized about having the perfect excuse? It used to happen all the time in school. "I don't have my homework. My Grandma died last night." "I can't participate in shirts-and-skins with this broken arm." "We were in a car accident on the way here. That's why I'm late." I fantasized about the obligation lifting, that dizzy pleasure you get when a struggle you have is perfectly understandable, when you have a real, legitimate reason to be excused.

The perfect excuse, however, is much more fun in theory. You know that little dizzy feeling? It comes at a cost so complex it's taken weeks to be able to write to you about it.

I haven't blogged, and I have the perfect excuse: I was in the hospital. I had pneumonia in one lung and a pulmonary embolism in the other. Most of you probably know this, being friends and family, but this is the first time I've actually put it into words. PEs are life-threatening and, as I learned later, kill about 1-in-3 people who get them. [I thought writing that would make it more real, but so far it hasn't.] The hardest part was not the week I spent in the hospital; it's been the weeks since that have proven the hardest as I try to incorporate this unexpected patch into my quilt. I'm never nervous writing to you, and I've been petrified of how I would talk about this, or even if I would talk about this. I'll tell the story as best I can.

I woke up on late Sunday night, January 20th, in an unearthly panic, and to this day it still feels like I'm caught in some unfinished dream. This was the night after Jess and I had been to visit Val in Newport News, one day after the last post. I'd been sick with a bad cough for about five days and the smoke from the Hilton Country Club hadn't helped. I knew I was going to have to get it looked at. Having had pneumonia before, I was familiar with the pain in my back when I inhaled deeply, and so I knew I needed to get on some antibiotics. I put the idea on an index card in my head, shoved it into my overstuffed mental to-do box, and told myself that a few more days wouldn't make a difference. I didn't have a doctor down here yet, and it seemed impractically annoying. Besides, I'd probably have to miss work.

I woke up only a few hours after falling to sleep. You know in movies when a character is having a really bad dream, and their eyes shoot awake and you're like, "No one wakes up that fast"? That was me, I woke up that fast, only I wasn't dreaming. I was having trouble breathing. People have asked me what it felt like, and all I could think about was "Turner and Hooch." You know how the old guy at the docks gets stabbed in the back up under the ribcage, and Turner figures he couldn't scream because if you get stabbed there, you can't scream? Well I was the old man, and every time I inhaled it felt like someone was driving a knife right up under my ribcage.

I started panicking because, duh, I couldn't breathe. I stood up, tried to walk it off. I went to the bathroom and got a drink of water, walked back, tried to lay back down, but the pain was sharp and unbearable. My arms started getting cold and numb, and it was at the moment, when the panic seeped over me, that I thought I was having a heart attack.

Anna told me that when I was a kid, I used to take a volume from the encyclopedia to read in bed. She said it was entertaining, but also weird, because what does an 8-year-old want with an encyclopedia? I think I got it in my mind, since my mom had spoken about these books as a treasure-trove of world knowledge, a Library of Alexandria on the bookshelf, that I should, you know, read them. And so I would start with "A," the idea in my mind to read through them. I would skip around, sometimes opting for "D" or "S" ("S" got a lot of reading when I hit 12, as it was my first legitimate information about sex). I would just read the entries that looked interesting. I was into cars and trains and planes then, and I'm sure I read a lot about them.

Well, when I was older, I kept up my fascination with encyclopedias, only by then it had become something of weird pre-teen experiment in the power of suggestion. I would come home after school and, during the two hours I had to myself, research health conditions, things like cancer and syphilis and heart attacks, and then I would sit there and read and, as I was reading, would become absolutely convinced that I had whatever condition I was reading about. I would check my lymph nodes for inflammation. I would look at my hands for rashes. It took Mom coming home to break the spell, to shoo away the thundercloud of ill that I had swirled around myself.

It's heart-attack day I remember best, however. I can still see myself sitting on the couch reading about heart attacks. We'd watched some horrible video in school where a man eats a casserole his daughter made and it was so greasy he had a heart attack and nearly died. Inexplicably fascinated, I opened up "H" to "Heart Attack," and as I read, I could actually feel my chest tightening up. My heart started pounding faster. I could swear that there was a "dull ache" in my arms. It felt so real, like it was happening right there. I felt like I knew intimately what a heart attack would feel like, and I scared the living crap out of myself.

This is the memory that came back to me when I awoke in the middle of the night 13 years later with a racing heart, shortness of breath, and numbness in my arms. A little part of me, the twelve-year-old who is still terrified of the things he can't control, said, "Something isn't right, Martin. Something is very, very wrong."

I woke up Jessie. I was crying. I told her I couldn't breathe. She must have heard something in my voice, because she awoke right away. At first she thought it was a panic attack. I was pacing around our apartment, standing in the living room trying to breathe and belch and do anything to relieve the pressure in my back. We debated for a good five minutes what to do. Should we call an ambulance? Should we draw a warm bath and just try to calm down? I Googled the nearest hospital, found one close by, and at 3:30 in the morning we got in the car and drove through the silent, chilly night to the emergency room.

The emergency room was empty, save for a father cradling his sleeping little boy. Concern hung on him like wet denim, and when I close my eyes I can still see his eyes, how open they were but how they didn't see the room, how they fought to see bright spots through gathering clouds.

I met with the nurse, who took my pulse and asked me questions. Within minutes I was in a hospital bed, taking breathing treatments, getting IVs, taking painkillers. The nurses were jovial and pleasant, laughing and talking and not at all reminiscent of 5 AM. I was set to be out of there quickly until the doctor ordered a test on a hunch. It came back positive, so they sent me down for a CT scan, where I had an allergic reaction to the iodine dye they inject you with. I remember lying on the gurney in the hallway alone, waiting for to be moved back to the emergency room, and feeling this itchiness in my eyes. It felt like my face was filling with salt water, and when I returned to the ER, I asked Jess if anything was wrong with my face. Five minutes later nurses were rushing around injecting Benadryl and saline, trying to keep my throat from swelling shut. I lay in the dark with a wet cloth over my eyes, and after the threat had passed Jessie and I laughed about how I looked like Quasimodo, one eye swollen open, the other swollen shut.

It was then, a washcloth over my eyes, that the doctor returned with another doctor. They told me that I had a blood clot in my left lung, and that I would need to be in the hospital for at least five days. I kept repeating the word "What?" over and over, in disbelief and shock. A nurse came in and told me that I couldn't move anymore, that I wouldn't be allowed to walk to the bathroom, that I could dislodge more clots. I spent that whole first day paralyzed and peeing into bottles, like I'd fallen off of my planet and into someone else's nightmare.

I've gone back and forth about what else to write about that week. It's been over a month now, and some memories are better left to myself. The best moments though were when my family and friends were with me. Mom drove down that night and stayed almost the whole week. My cousin Laura, who lives in DC, was over to keep Jess company and bring a little sunshine. My brother came down, I received daily phone calls from Mat and Dave, my sisters and family, flowers came from Vicky and Dan, Tooch and Jeep, and Emily and Jeffrey surprised me and came all the way from Texas to spend part of the week in the hospital room with me, keeping me company when Jess was at school. My nurses were, frankly, gifts from God, each attentive, caring, and patient. I made it a point to learn the name of every person who walked into my room in ICU 2, from the pulmonologist to the lady who cleaned the bathroom. I wanted them to know that I cared and was grateful, that their motions and thoughts and concern was vital to me.

The worst moments were at night, alone with the tones of IV machines and dream-filled sleep about work and elementary school that was shattered by painful blood draws every four hours. During the day there was enough activity to look forward to to keep me distracted, but at night it was just me and my thoughts. Every ache was another clot, every elevated heartbeat an emergency. When I coughed blood, I thought I was dying. I knew that being in the hospital presented a host of dangers, and I tried to be as active in my care as possible, but when I was alone, I was vulnerable. Things I couldn't control were coming for me. They had already tried once. There were many private terrors that week, tiny moments of despair. But they were countered by an overwhelming goodness and love from people far and wide who took the time to say, "We care about you." I came home to 24 "Get Well" cards and as many phone messages and e-mails. The outpouring was unbelievable.

In the six weeks that have passed since, I haven't gotten my epiphany. I was really hoping for one, you know? Just some moment where it all became clear and everything was revealed, and the fragile, shaken Nothing in my gut would be explained and answered. But it hasn't come. It's not coming. The most I can hope for is a gradual reveal, a slow fade from black. I came out of it knowing, for the first time, that I am not going to live forever, that in fact I am quite fragile and easily taken, a cathedral of windows. That said, I have a profound urgency now about wanting to be "healthy." Jessie and I joined a fitness program, and despite a bit of inevitable whining (mostly from me), the shape I'm getting into will be one of the great triumphs of my life.

So. There we go. On blood thinners for the foreseeable future, and have some restrictions on my diet, but those can be saved for later posts. In the meantime, I am back, and with fewer excuses. What's that old Chinese curse about "interesting times"? I feel as if life has just gotten started with me...

Your,
Martin