The Snowball

Nothing is guaranteed. Nothing makes sense. No take-backs. No reset buttons. Life’s not fair. Everything can change in an instant and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. – Things people say that you never fully understand, until you do.

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As slow as it was getting to this point, the week after entering the ER went by too fast to remember everything and everyone. But the information thrown at us in that time is scarred into memory, and it quickly got bigger and more serious.

I’ve always asked that, if I have surgery, someone take pictures so I can see what my organs look like. After all, how often do you have the chance to see your insides? So, I was happy to see my ribs, spine, and lung outline in the chest x-ray images I had a few hours earlier but when the nurse, who previously told me I was fine, said I could see my CT scan, I was excited to say the least. Though, that wouldn’t come until the next day and *spoiler* it wasn’t very exciting.

To appease my requests, the nurse told me the computers in the ER couldn’t display the images without crashing but that I could see them all once I was in a room. I did, however, receive the page of radiology results along with a warning of: “In addition to the emboli they also saw some nodules on your lungs. So after this all gets cleared up, they will probably want to do a biopsy to see what they are.” Ok, I can take that, lets focus on this issue and then maybe there’s something else that MIGHT be wrong. Still two separate issues.

At this point Meredith and I were trying to get some sleep somewhere in the bowels of Baton Rouge General under the impression I would be there a few days for observation. But I got us a little more attention when, for the first time while connected to monitors, my heart did that thing where it jumps up to a crazy high rate. Within a very short period there were several people around me connecting wires to my existing stickers for an EKG, getting blood pressure readings, and generally in a frenzy while my heart was steady at 171bpm. The highest it had ever been. I had been trying to tell them for hours that it was doing this, but some things you just have to see to believe.

Once again, the doctors didn’t really know what to think of the 32-year-old with significant blood clots and heart in atrial fibrillation. They were able to get the afib under control with some IV injections each time it jumped up, but they stopped giving me water or ice chips when I asked; and for the first time I got the notion of how serious this was. I couldn’t have liquids since they weren’t sure whether I would need surgery immediately. When the on-call cardiologist arrived, who was thrilled to come see me at 2am, he put everyone at ease and gave the green light for liquids and said surgery could wait. Even though there was some pressure on my heart from an apparent pericardial effusion (too much juice around my heart). He then left as quickly as he came.

We were happy to be moved into a room around 4am and even managed to get a few hours of sleep. Most of the next day was filled with visitors and explaining to them how I was lucky to be still alive after walking around for weeks with a pulmonary embolism and what doctors believe to be a liter of fluid around my heart. By this point too, the blood thinners were beginning to have an affect on the clots and were able to be coughed up. Which according to the nurses were a good thing. It was, nonetheless, freaky to see the huge chunks of blood that were coming up from within. I'll spare you the pictures but you can trust that I have them.

As with a lot of things in my life, I got lucky with my team of doctors through this ordeal. They were all fantastic and there aren’t enough good things that I can say about them. I saw the first of them on Friday evening and learned more about my heart juice situation and how they could easily fix that with surgery. He was then followed by a nice man who did an echocardiogram for video of my heart. And he was followed by another doctor that would finally show me the images from my scans.

With a room full of family, my pulmonologist walked into our room with his laptop and said he would go through images and explain what the scans showed. Queue my excitement. But before he started to explain more, everyone in the room could tell it wouldn’t be good news and they let Meredith and me alone to hear him out. My excitement waned. Don’t get me wrong, the images he had were amazing! He showed us the slides from the CT scan that displayed my lungs, heart, spinal cord, the clots, and everything crystal clear. Especially the 2-centimeter tumor on my left upper lobe…

He spent a lot of time with us and was incredibly detailed in his explanation making sure we understood and was compassionate in general, but I can summarize what he said next as this:

It doesn’t make sense for these clots to be caused from a 5-hour flight. It is most likely cancer that is causing your blood to form clots, which are now in your lungs, which is causing your heart to pump fast, which caused the fluid to accumulate on your heart. So, if this is cancer, which it most likely is, let’s hope that it’s not lung cancer. If it is, it’s most likely also in the fluid around your heart, and if that’s the case we’re talking about something that’s really bad.

Well that escalated quickly.

We did our best explaining to everyone the terrifying information we had just been given while they were banished in the hallway but didn’t have much time to cry about it. I was scheduled for surgery in the morning.

In a 24-hour period I went from being ‘fine’ to Meredith shaving my chest for a heart procedure. As newlyweds we, of course, heard all the ‘in sickness and in health’ jokes which were just as funny each time, but everything else seemed to be snowballing and we weren’t sure where it would stop. For every piece of information we had, there were three times as many unknowns for which we would have to wait for answers.

Excited to see images of my heart