Breathless

I bitched so much that they hung this on my door, and after that people tiptoed in and apologized for turning on lights even at midday. And, yes, keratoconus does mean sudden bright light hurts my eyes … but actually the spirit of my bitching was more along the lines of Proverbs 27:14 – “He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.”

Today didn’t start well.

There was a thump at the door, the rattle of a trolley full of sharp implements, a hurting blaze of lights. I yelped and clamped a pillow over my face. With a trill of merry laughter my tormentor took my hand, stuck a needle into it, and plundered my blood, then made her galumphing departure.

I wanted to go back to sleep, but – of course – I needed to pee. I disentangled my legs from clutching sheets, hit the call button, disconnected the wires attached to my chest, and tottered all the way to the bathroom without tripping over my IV drip. I assumed the position. Released the flow into a little plastic stetson-shaped thingummy positioned at the top of the bowl, because they measure my bladderly essence. And woke abruptly to the wet and horrible realization that it hadn’t been emptied after my last visit.

The toilet hat – can you see it? When you’re being pumped full of fluids, they have to make sure what’s going in is finding its way out. But if you have a capacious bladder, you don’t want to use it twice in a row without someone emptying it out first.

By the time I’d swabbed myself down and had been tucked back into a freshly made bed by a sympathetic nurse who managed to control her laughter until after she’d left my room, I was wide awake. And I was irritable and feeling sorry for myself – in short, completely over the sense of euphoria I had been feeling for the previous few days.

I should probably tell you about those days.

They started last Tuesday, when I visited Wonder Woman and caused both of us some perturbation by almost collapsing when I reached the top of the flight of stairs leading from her garden to her living room. “Dang I’m unfit!” I wheezed, mopping my sweaty face. “I have got to quit talking about getting more exercise, and start walking! Just as soon as I buy a Fitbit!” Well, it turned out she had a Fitbit that she’d bought for herself before she realized that setting it up would take at least half an hour of technological tinkering. Wonder Woman is nearly 90; she figured she didn’t want to spend one of her last remaining half hours that way, so she gave it to me. And although that’s somewhat peripheral to this story, if I were writing actual Literature it would count as Dramatic Irony, which proves that sometimes life does indeed imitate art.

Anyway. To get back to my point.

Wednesday I was draggy. I spent it trudging through the bare minimum of chores, yawning over my news feed, and wishing the black dog would just damn well let go and let me breathe. I didn’t feel especially depressed – just so, so tired, and when I thought of all the things I wanted to do -happy things, like gardening and writing and giving the horses a bath and taking Argos to the river for some training time and baking bread and even shining my little house – I felt overwhelmed and weary. I’d felt that way for a while … but on Wednesday just breathing felt hard. And late in the afternoon, when I went outside to feed my chickens, I had to lean quite heavily on my cane, and when I came back inside I was staggering and I had to sit down and just quietly pant for a while.

While I was sitting I consulted Dr. Google about Reasons To Be Short Of Breath. His insights were disturbing.

I told myself to quit being stupid. When you’re lazy and obese, of course you’re gonna be short of breath, I said to me. This isn’t rocket science! No further research is required! I got myself up on my hind legs and moved laundry around and was going to swab down the kitchen counters, but … first I needed to take another little rest. I chatted a bit more with Dr. Google. I decided that if I didn’t feel better by Thursday morning, I should probably call my doctor.

This isn’t something I do lightly. This is America, the Land of Hell-no-it-ain’t-free, and I don’t have health insurance, because the Hubbit and I inhabit that awkward gap between people who qualify for subsidized (and therefore affordable) insurance, and those who can sniff judgmentally at the Affordable Care Act. That is, the Hubbit has Medicare and supplemental insurance, which is just as well given his penchant for dancing with heavy machinery, but I pretty much just keep chugging along and trusting God to keep me going as long as he wants me around. It’s worked for me.

I’d been looking forward to Wednesday night, because we’d been promised a spectacular show by the Perseids – no moon, clearish sky. In 20 years of trying I’ve never actually seen the Perseid shower, and it’s become a bit of an obsession – so this year was definitely going to be The One. I planned to go out into the backyard with a blanket at around 11.00PM and just lie and watch them.

Only, between an increasingly insistent Dr. Google and sheer lack of oxygen to the brain, by 11.00PM it was dawning on me that maybe this shit was real. So I texted the Hubbit from the bedroom (he was in his study) to tell him I was worried … and waited for him to come busting through, brimming over with husbandly concern (and maybe a hug or two), to insist that it was only money and drag me off to the hospital. Only he didn’t, so I sent a couple more texts phrased to make him feel like a heel, and then I went to get dressed so I could drive my own damn self to the hospital, and found his phone lying on the floor of the closet.

He does this. He scatters his phone in his wake like one-at-a-time confetti. It drives me completely insane.

Turns out you can’t stomp and shout very effectively without breathing, but I did my best, and after delivering his phone to him I went and got dressed, stopping as needed to inhale. Then the Hubbit wandered into the bedroom and said that of course he would take me to the hospital because that was his responsibility as my husband. So I came a bit unglued and broke my phone, because it doesn’t take that much breath to thump things.

On the way to the hospital we stopped so I could hang my head out of the car window and look for meteors, but I didn’t see any.

I don’t remember much about the ensuing 20-or-so hours, which is a pity, because the whole time I was blogging about it in my head, and it was hilarious. But I couldn’t write it down because I had to keep my arms straight on account of the IV drips inside my elbows, plus the persistent interruptions by people with machines that needed to interact with me, and other people who kept sticking me with needles and taking more and still more of my sluggish, unwilling blood. I remember snapshots…

Did you know that getting an MRI is almost exactly like going through a wormhole in space? You lie down and someone injects you with a magical substance that uncoils a delicious heat in unmentionable places, and the world moves and you’re inside a giant halo, and lights flicker and the voice of God tells you “Stop breathing” and then, just at the moment you absolutely have to, “You can breathe”.

I asked for water and they told me I was “nothing by mouth” while the doctors decided whether or not to do a procedure to blast the blood clots out of my lung, and I thought that was strange because I’d thought my heart was failing, but it turned out my heart was fine but one of my lungs (I’m not sure which one) was all clotted up and icky, and this was sort of a good thing, relatively speaking, because if caught in time it will heal, whereas a failing heart can only be helped, not healed. And then after a while someone brought me a menu and told me to order lunch, and that’s how I found out that they’d decided the procedure wasn’t necessary, which was also good news, especially as I was hungry enough to eat a doctor by then.

They asked me questions about my family medical history and I did sums in my head and realized that my father was about the age I am now when he had the heart attack that turned his life around, so I decided I could turn my life around too.

The tech who did the echocardiogram helped me look at the screen so I could see inside my own heart, and it was working so, so hard! It didn’t flop helplessly like the sad, sick heart of the transplant patient I told you about, and nor did it rat-a-tat like the young, new heart that patient received. My heart is like the little engine that could, and the sight of it working with such steady determination to take a too-heavy load up a too-steep hill made me weep with gratitude and shame.

Eventually – it was Thursday evening by then – they brought me up to the room where I’m writing this. It’s a spacious private room, and even has a small sitting area with a recliner and a view of the hills. They tucked me into a real bed and fussed around asking what they could do to make me comfortable, and all I could think to ask for was hospital socks.

Hospital socks – conceivably the greatest achievement of medical technology.

At some point during the ensuing days I learned the name of what had happened to me. I had a pulmonary embolism, and it probably happened because I spend too much time sitting and feeling sad instead of getting up on my hind legs and living my life. I let the black dog harry me into the Valley … but I skirted the Shadow, and I’m coming back out into the light, and as God is my witness that dog is going to learn to walk to heel.

I haven’t had much experience of hospitals. Prior to this adventure, the only times I’ve stayed overnight in a hospital were after I was born, and when I was 10 years old and had my tonsils out, and when the Girl Child was born. But I’ve heard enough about hospitals from other people to have learned that they’re dehumanizing places, where one becomes a patient rather than a person, where the food is awful, where a good night’s rest is less important than the staff routines. So my own experience has been surprising.

The fact is, I have felt cherished. Protected. Provided with a refuge where I had one job and one job only: to heal – first my body, but it’s also given me a quiet place to begin healing my soul. Little by little my breath has come easier. On Saturday I had an actual shower. Yesterday – Sunday – they said I could go home, and disconnected the IV and taught me how to inject myself.

Now I’m just waiting for my final visit with the doctor, and then I can peel off the sticky pads that keep me connected to the heart monitor, and they’ll remove my last IV port, and I can take off the hospital gown and put on my real clothes. They’ll wheel me down to the main entrance and the Hubbit will come, and we’ll go buy me a phone and swing by Yokes for a supply of fresh vegetables – because mealtimes in the Took household are getting a radical makeover. And then we’ll pick up Argos from boarding and we’ll go home.

*****

A little over a week has passed since I wrote this post. It took a while to get my computer hooked up again and download the pictures, and I’ve once again been spending way too much time just sitting. I think about getting up and moving … I think about how I’ll die if I don’t – not right away, because I’m on drugs that keep my blood safe and runny, but I’ll come off them in a two or three months, and then if I haven’t changed my habits … Well, I have to change my habits. That is all. I’m putting it in writing. And I have a Fitbit. Surely that will make a difference!