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Never shot at once, but still bleeding to death in Iraq - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 1/30/2012 2:00 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
"Of course you should go. It would indicate some success on our part don't you think, Bob?" My doctor said.
My doc is a well traveled medical man - at one time or another, he's been to every "bad-lands" on earth in the pursuit of various medical missions. As for me, there was some angst, regarding my first trip to the war zone in Iraq, considering my blood and heart condition. My doc did not bat an eye as he sent me on my way in pursuit of my own project. It is the new world we live in. People live with all kinds of cancers, conditions, and difficulties.
The treatment methods and philosophy for my own humble blood and heart condition has drastically changed over the decades. They used to park me in the hospital when the condition flared up, saying movement would kill me; now, they roust me back to work, proclaiming that being in a hospital bed will...., kill me. Us lucky survivors of health challenges and the medical industry that treats said conditions are nowadays mainstreamed amongst the population; and, all is expected to be forgiven.
Traveling to Iraq was a stretch though, and I knew it. Expect no doctors at one's beckoning call, no calling 911, no heat to stay warm in the mountains, no electricity, no air conditioning in the desert, no help, few paved roads, no maps, no police, no clean water, and absolutely no ambulances in the rural areas that I would be skirting through.
I was well on my way through Iraq and nearing Iran. My mafia driver of course drove like a madman. There was no shoulders on the narrow road girdling the mountains. A truck came around a corner, he was passing a gaggle of cars, and likewise driving like a madman; he ran my driver and I into the dirt and rocks along the side of the road. The ride jostled me around but the driver righted our car. All he did was light up another cigarette, and change the track on the cassette player - a different Kurdish melody.
I usually rode with my arm out the window, and when we blasted into the dirt and rocks, I must have clenched the window frame with my forearm. A day later a nasty bruise appeared. I contacted my wife via our code, and mentioned that I had been bounced around, bruised, was tired, sore, but apparently ok. The soldiers there, go through 10 far worse episodes, all before breakfast every day.
By the time I had finished my work near the Iranian border - it was the area Saddam Hussein had poison gassed the Kurds in the late 1980s - the bruising on my arm had spread. By the time I was leaving the country at the Turkish border a couple weeks later, my whole upper right side had dark black and blue marks. What was happening? Other than this abnormality, my time in Iraq had saw no military or criminal skirmishes. There was that brief encounter with the Iraqi-Kurdish hotel police in Dahuk, and the wrong-way idiot taxi driver in Zakho, but basically, I had weaved in and out of all the bad stuff Iraq had to offer up. I had sought out the culture of the beleaguered people living in the multi-layered war zone, found it, and survived.
When I got to my fixer dude in Turkey where I had staged up to enter Iraq and now rest after my exit, I had trouble walking. My Turkish pal expressed concern. The condition leveled off as I partook in Kurdish culture, music, and homemade wine for a couple days. My Turkish liaison sent me off and I headed to Van, Turkey. On the bus ride to Van, at this point the bruising and mild pain had manifested itself with severe pain and my whole right side was black and blue. Also, I was starting to experience rather pesky headaches.
Van claims to be famous for their big lake and also white..., Turkish Van Cats. They have a huge dilapidated statue of a white kitty at one main boulevard. A sad and mangy black cat pestered me for a tid-bit of food every time I came and went from my musty-carpet hotel. Cats aside, the place was however replete with Turkish Army commandos and ubiquitous police presence. I set up in Van a couple days - the Kurdish region just south of the infamous Mount Ararat of biblical fame. But because of my condition I cut my Turkish civil war zone work short and flew back to the Turkish Capital of Ankara to rest in my little hotel in Ulus, the old part of the city, before flying home.
Back in the Ankara, it was not going to work out either, I could no longer walk well, and could not stand the pain. I enlisted the confidence of a ruddy British guy about my age that lived at my hotel and worked in Ankara. He was a big man and towered over me a bit. His hair was thinning and he wore utilitarian work glasses. I had befriended him on my stay there before leaving for Iraq.
"Nothing like a beer and a the watching of a good football match on the telly to cure what ails you," he said to me with an apprehensive and consummately optimistic British smile. I had handed him a paper with all my vital information such as my full name and home address, Heide's information, and a way to contact her if I should kick the bucket.
The next day, off I went to the diplomatic neighborhood of Ankara. The hotel desk man had given me a note for the bus driver explaining to him in Turkish that I was ill. He gave me the long ride cross town for free. A day before I visited a wood shop near my little hotel and had bought a wooden cane to help me walk.
Across from the U.S. Embassy is a hospital that foreigners sometimes use. I held my breath at what this might cost me. But, it was clear to me, no one would let me on an international flight home, looking and acting like a half dead man. To my surprise it was quiet in their tiny emergency room. None of the staff spoke English. A young nurse took my vitals while smiling with bouts of quite nervous laughter. I had my Turkish language book.
"Blood, heart, problems," I had wrote on a note for her. She smiled and fixated on my tattoos. Back in America, a tattoo of a naked lady with a rose and another in a firefighters hat, along with all the other stuff I have on my arm seemed right at home. Here in this 99 percent Muslim country, my crass body art display seem woefully inappropriate.
After a bit, a young doctor entered the room and looked me over. "A test or two," he said in broken English.
After the cute chuckling young nurse took some blood from me with a needle the size of an ink pen, I waited for a half hour or so.
The doc came back in and said, "Your coagulation level (International Normalized Ratio - INR - used to be called Prothrombin Time - pro-time) is off our scale." It should read about 2.5 or so in my case, to clot my blood normal. Their machine only went up to 10, but I was way above that. That would explain the bruising and the headaches. My blood was so thin I was bleeding internally. The tiny capillaries, veinuals, and arterioles at the microscopic ends of the body's blood system were leaking like a sieve. I was slowly bleeding to death.
I had rarely had trouble with too thin of blood. My troubles always manifested in hyper-clotting, which is likewise deadly.
"You could die," my young Turkish doctor said rather nonchalantly. "You must stop taking your blood thinner. Come back every day until you either die or are somewhat better."
So for a week I dutifully went cross town to his little emergency clinic and the cute chuckling nurse took my blood with her ink pen thick needle. It never got below six on their INR scale. That number alone is dangerous on a good day. My doc would have plunked me in the hospital - new treatment philosophies not-with-standing.
"I want to give you a blood transfusion," my young doctor said after a couple days. I pondered this and asked him if I might decline.
"Of course," he said. "We abide by international ethics." He looked hurt.
The impetus of my refusal was me not wanting to forever have on my record that I had received a blood transfusion in a Third World country.
"I have emailed your doctor in West Consin," the young doctor said on my fifth visit. "We had a good chat. You can go home now, he will take care of you. Go to him as soon as you get home. But no more blood thinner until you speak to him. Remember your INR seems to be stuck on six for now - way too high."
I had never had this problem before, it was always an over-clotting issue. But here I was slowly bleeding to death. It was one of the most painful experiences I have ever gone through. Pain killers had little effect.
To my surprise, the total bill for all the visits and tests was a whopping..., fifty Bucks. And thinking back, I never saw another patient in that small quiet emergency room.
The only serendipitous moment was at Heathrow Airport in London. A pretty Indian woman working for British Airlines ran to me as I stood in a line of four-hundred people waiting to check in. She pulled me and my cane to the front of the line.
What caused the abnormal reaction to my normally rock solid reliable medications? Who knows? - stress, loss of 30 pounds, little sleep in the war zone, poor diet, heat in the desert, freezing in the mountains. For sure it had nothing to do with the crazy taxi ride. The bruising, pain, and black and blue would have come regardless of my rough activities and good or bad fortune.
A young medical Resident in my teaching clinic back home had once warned, "I am concerned Bob is taking so much blood medicine he could suffer a random reaction down the road at some point."
The older docs brushed the Resident's concerns aside. How prophetic the young Resident was. It was not funny now as I struggled in Turkey.
I made it - apparently, but the odd experience will always be part of me.
My first visit to Iraq, and I was never shot at once, but came very, very, damn close to..., bleeding to death anyway.
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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