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Blood Clots - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 12/22/2011 1:30 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
Back in late 1990, the Meningitis episode in August had so weakened my immune system, I acquired Thrombosis (abnormal blood clotting) by October. It was my "first official" ordeal with abnormal clotting. But, there had been many precursors. Again this clotting episode was also misdiagnosed (by the same local doctor that blinked on the Meningitis). As for the clotting, he had me on a regimen of antibiotics claiming I surely had an infection in my right leg that was causing the swelling and pain that so besieged me. Again I retreated to the Dallas Veterans' Hospital for a second opinion - but it was too late. The same VA doc that flagged the Meningitis again came to the rescue and diagnosed my clots, and again before I hit the cot. I had driven my landscape truck with empty trailer in tow to the hospital. They put me in intensive care immediately. I spent almost a month in the hospital. My father-in-law eventually drove my truck and trailer back to my house.
This blood condition has then plagued me off and on for years. In the early years, doctors continually pestered me as to my culpability with the condition. They insisted I must be doing something to cause it. They offered up actions such as bumping into things with my legs or playing tackle football or some such thing. I was always left feeling guilty. Although as I have noted in past vignettes, there was the suspicious earlier bouts with "alleged" septicemia in my legs which landed me in the hospital twice for lengthy stays while I was in the Army. Also, some Phlebitis episodes popped up from time to time in my life. And then, finally years later, my propensity to clot or bleed abnormally was finally diagnoses by University of Wisconsin Hospital doctors as a genetic anomaly - I was born with the damn condition. It was not my fault after all.
Doctors for years were always blaming me. They always asked, "What are you doing to cause this?" In those days it was thought that a young man in his twenties and early thirties just could not possibly get blood clots. Eventually though as the medical culture evolved in its diagnoses of such conditions they finally determined the genetic variable with me. Poetically, the medication to battle the clotting part of my dilemma (blood thinner) was developed at UW-Madison, Wisconsin just down the street from their hospital.
But back in that VA Hospital in Dallas in 1990, the pain was unbelievable. I was in a room with two other veterans. One was an American Indian. I still remember his quiet deep voice reminding me to stay alive throughout one of the first bad nights. Despite his own poor health he sat up with me all that night monitoring my digression into hell.
In later bouts with the condition in my life, nothing except Meningitis or internal bleeding is more painful. Clots harden the legs, and lungs, and any thing else they get into and then blood can't get through, no medications even put a dent in the pain. In regards to clots in the lungs, air can't get in or out. The tiny mechanisms that take in the oxygen and then send it to the body are corrupted by clotting; in kind, they can not cleanse the deoxygenated blood out of the body either - very painful.
Although the bedside manner of the docs back then was a bit to be desired, they saved my life. The third poor guy in my VA room had cancer. A doc came in one day and quickly said to him, "You're dying man, get your affairs in order." The doc abruptly left; the man sat stunned for two hours.
I remember looking out the window from an upper floor when I could finally get up and walk; a tumble weed rolled across the parking lot. A few days earlier a VA doc had told me I too would die and to say goodbye to my wife - something I would have to do a couple more times over the years until the condition was correctly diagnosed.
After a few days I got into my wheel chair against orders and snuck out of my room to surprise my my wife and head her off in the garden down by the entrance to the hospital. Before I went out to the garden I stopped in the small chapel. I must have been beleaguered - I rarely deferred to a deity of any order. A pastor happened to be in the small, quiet, and comfortable vestry. He was a black man with a short-sleeved collared shirt; and, by the jagged scars on his forearm I surmised he was most likely a Veteran as well.
I spoke in a query of sorts. "Feel kind'a of young to be almost dying," I said to the pastor, who was also in a wheel chair.
"I don't think it has much to do with age," he said after a moment of hesitation and then he wheeled off to his tiny office.
The pain of clotting is close to indescribable. Think of the worst cramp you have ever had - then imagine it all over your body for 36 hours. Pain killer has no affect. When I realized I would make it and saw that tumble weed, I made my mind up then to return to Wisconsin. Life was too short - Texas would never be home. And in retrospect, my home hospital did finally zero in on the clotting condition - that condition that has killed me at least three times and then some. It is unclear why I survived not once but several times, what has so handily killed so many other unsuspecting people after just one clotting episode. Dan Blocker (Hoss) of television Bonanza fame died from blood clots back before the medical world had a good grip on the illness.
Thank any god you may bring with you then, that a few years ago, the docs at the University of Wisconsin Hospital finally decided it was genetic and I was born with it. That reality completely altered my treatment regimen and philosophy. The genetic marker would also explain a lot of problems I had in my youth. Go figure, I played four years of high school football (made all-conference defensive end and also played offensive guard), and of course, Uncle Sam let me in the Army (and made me stay the whole hitch too-boot). Not necessarily jobs you need to be doing if you have a propensity to bleed to death, or clot to death off and on - and, the condition has a tendency to adversely affect my heart beat leading to numerous times then that it has had to be stopped and then restarted...an equally woefully miserable experience.
I spent the next summer of 1991 working my landscape business alone with no helpers and a trimmed down customer base. It took me a year and a half to get just part of my strength back. I remember spending many hours resting and listening to updates of Gulf War I on the radio. The next spring of 1992, Heide and I packed up and moved home to Wisconsin.
Who would have imagined back then that just 15 years later, I would go to Iraq as a journalist during our second war there... and go twice - with apparently correctly managed medication and treatment regimen.
Nowadays, considering I have survived, the doctors seem to pride themselves in "not denying" their patient any activities..., including going to a war zone.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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