Last Thursday, I started feeling sick. I was coughing, with chest congestion, like a chest cold. By Friday morning, it was bad enough that I took some Mucinex. That seemed to help for a little while. But by 11:30pm, I was having serious trouble breathing, and I called 911. The medic unit (and a fire truck) came quickly, and once they got me in the back and did a quick exam on me, they gave me oxygen and took me to Suburban Hospital, which was only a few blocks from my home. The oxygen wasn’t really helping. My lungs felt like they were getting smaller and smaller, I simply could not inhale any air, no matter how hard I tried.
At the hospital it was a busy emergency room, and I had what seemed like a long wait to see a doctor. It was probably only a few minutes, but when you are drowning in your own body fluids it can seem like forever. By the time a doctor got to me, I was in full respiratory arrest (familiar story to those who know about my 2004 experience with congestive heart failure). I was immediately put on a special ventilator machine called “BI-PAP,” had a catheter inserted, and injected with powerful diuretics to start getting all the accumulated fluid out of my body. The ER doctor said that when I came in, I “had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” I was only a few minutes from taking my last breath. Those injections continued throughout my stay at the hospital. Once I was stabilized, I was moved from the ER to the Intensive Care Unit.
In the ICU I continued on the BI-PAP machine for 24 hours. During that time they ran many tests on me to determine what exactly happened. They found that my kidneys were still functioning at the same low levels they have been since 2004. But I was severely anemic, and was overloaded with sodium, a likely cause of the fluid retention. They also did testing on my heart. The blood work revealed that I had had a minor heart attack. However the good news is that the EEG and ECG showed that here was in fact no damage to the heart itself. So I dodged a bullet there.
Finally on Sunday I was transferred to a normal hospital room to continue recovery and testing. They let me go home this afternoon, with a lot of work to do. A whole new diet. Exercise plan in the near future. And another one of my lives spent…
So I am home now. I am not at all happy about my situation. When I had my first CHF episode in 2004, I never fully recovered my strength. Now I feel even weaker. Just when I was starting to feel stronger, this happens. I am angry, but nothing I can do about it but deal with it…… At least I have my plush and my balloons!