Saga -- Part One

I came home early on Wednesday and went to the dentist for a routine cleaning, then I went home. Not long after that, I started to feel, well, a little off. We have a standing phone call with the Benster every Wednesday evening and we discussed his latest adventures, then we had a quiet dinner. I then went downstairs and turned on the presidential debate.

As the evening went on, I could feel that something was wrong. I started to perspire and, as the evening went on, it became more difficult to breathe. When my wife came down and we watched the news. She looked at me and could see that I was laboring.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. Do I feel warm to you?" I responded.

She put her hand on my forehead. "No, not really."

"I feel warm. I've been sweaty and I don't know why," I said.

As the newscast went on, I was starting to have difficulty breathing. "Something's not right," I said.

Upstairs, my daughter was getting ready for bed and had just retired for the evening when we came up the stairs. At this point, I was having difficulty breathing and getting frightened. My family has a horrible history with heart disease and while I wasn't having any chest pains, something was clearly not right.

"I think I need to go to the doctor," I said.

"Urgent care is probably closed now, so we're going to have to go the hospital," my wife said.

"Yep."

"Okay. Let me get my keys."

It's about a 20 minute drive from our house to United Hospital. As we were going along, my brain was going into overdrive. This can't be happening. I have so much to do. I have to reject fear, but how do you do that? I tried to pray, but my mind was racing so fast it was difficult to focus. As my wife took the turn from 280 to 94 east into St. Paul, lightning flashes were visible and vivid in the eastern sky.

We got to the hospital. "Can you walk to the door?" my wife asked.

"I think so," I responded. "Go park the car and I'll meet you in there."

I found a triage nurse. The modern emergency room is a lot more corporate than what I remembered in the past. The nurse was sitting at a work station with a computer, but she had a blood pressure cup nearby. She started getting my information and then took my blood pressure. It was over 200.

"That's very high. Are you experiencing any chest pains?" she asked.

"No, not really, but I'm having a difficult time breathing."

"We'll get some blood taken right away. We'll also give you an EKG. We'll be able to see if you're having a heart attack pretty quickly. Have a seat and we'll have someone out to see you right away."

By then, my wife had walked in and I sat with her. Within about three minutes, they had taken blood and done an EKG. The EKG looked normal. But things weren't right. "We're going to get you a chest x-ray and a CT scan," another nurse told me. We have to get your blood pressure down and we can do that, but we need to find out what's happening."

"If I'm not having a heart attack, what would be causing the difficulty in breathing?" I asked.

"I don't know. It could be a number of things. It could be a pulmonary embolism. The X-ray and CT scan will be able to tell us that," she said.

Pulmonary embolism. Two of my least favorite words. A pulmonary embolism is when a blood clot formed elsewhere in the body travels through the body and reaches the lungs, making it impossible to breathe. My father died in the hospital because he developed a pulmonary embolism during his recovery from surgery. These days that rarely happens, but a pulmonary embolism can develop in a variety of ways.

I had taken a tumble over the weekend, while walking in the darkness of the vast expanse of land at Eastview High School. We'd been there to see my daughter's marching band compete and the only available parking was about a third of a mile from the stadium. I hurt my ankle a bit and got a few scrapes, but other than being sore the next day, I thought everything was better. Could that have caused a clot to form? I would have to await the answer.

Next -- a long night in the ER.