I don’t generally like writing about myself on Def-Con News but many of you have wished me well and been puling for me so I feel like you deserve to know what the fuck I’ve been doing for the past 3 weeks.
As you may have heard, I was hospitalized with a blood clot in my leg that also moved into my lungs. I’m out now but still in a lot of pain and heavily medicated. Hopefully this story makes sense and doesn’t come off like narcotic stream-of-unconsciousness nonsense.
3 weeks ago on Friday I was getting ready to light the barbecue when I got seriously lightheaded. I ended up blacking out in my backyard. I have no idea how long I was out but I don’t think it was too long. After I was able to pick myself up and get back in the house, it occurred to me that I was severely dehydrated. Because I’m a dude, I went with diagnosing myself rather than going to a doctor.
I started a major hydration program of chugging water, Gatorade, and Pedialite. I figured I needed electrolytes because as Idiocracy tells us, it’s what plants crave.
The next day, Saturday, I still felt like shit. I started writing my weekly WTF? column, but had to abandoned it because I was just too ill. I ended up sitting on the couch all day and night binging Cobra Kai, which is excellent by the way. No seriously, if like The Karate Kid, you’ll love this show and if you don’t like The Karate Kid, what’s the matter with you?
On Sunday, I started to feel a little bit better. I wasn’t lightheaded anymore and I was actually pissing again, though it was dark and stinky. But then another problem arose: I had a sharp pain in my left calf muscle. Again I self-diagnosed and decided it was a cramp related to my sever dehydration.
Well, that cramp started to spread. On Monday, my entire calf was sore and swollen. By Tuesday it spread into my foot and lower thigh. By Wednesday my entire leg swelled up and it was extremely painful.
On Thursday I decided to stop playing doctor and went to an actual doctor, an emergency care clinic to be specific. The doctor came in, looked at my leg and told me to go to the emergency room immediately. She said I obviously have a blood clot in my leg and if I don’t get treated it could be deadly.
By the time I got to the hospital my leg was so swollen that I was scared it was going to explode. When to doctor took a look at it, the look on her face was: “fuck!” She sent me to get an ultrasound on my leg veins to determine if I had a blood clot. After it was performed I asked the technician who administered it if I did indeed have a clot. She said she wasn’t allowed to share that information with me, but she also had a “fuck” look on her face.
The doc came back in and told me I had a massive blood clot from the top of my thigh to my ankle. I now understood that “fuck” look everyone kept giving me. Next they sent me to get an MRI on my chest to make sure the clot hadn’t moved into my lungs. Welp, I had massive clot in my lungs too and the nurse told me it’s a good thing I came in when I did or I might have died.
They started me immediately on blood thinners, which for some reason have to be injected into my stomach. They also offered me pain killers but I turned them down because I was under the impression the blood thinners were going to work fairly quickly and I was willing to put up with the pain for a day or so. As it turns out, the blood thinners take weeks to kick in. I’ve been out of the hospital for almost 2 weeks and my leg is just now starting to shrink back down to normal and I’m still in a lot of pain.
Once I understood this was was going to a long painful thing, I accepted the painkillers. First they gave me Tylenol, which didn’t do shit. Next they gave codeine, which also didn’t do shit. Finally they tried this stuff called Norco, which got me real high and took away the pain. I’m still taking it, but I can’t wait to stop because it’s a narcotic and I don’t want to get addicted. I got enough problems right now.
I saw a vascular surgeon, a cardiologist, a hematologist, and dozens of other doctors and nurses while I was hospitalized. They all said the same thing: that it didn’t make any sense that I would get such a massive blood clot out of the blue. They all also said that I was young, healthy, and not obese which was nice to hear.
With that, they started putting me through every test you can imagine. I had MRIs, CT scans, and ultrasounds on my whole body. They also took about 75 separate vials of blood for various tests. Everything came back normal. My heart, lungs, and organs were all fine. I didn’t have any illness, diseases, or genetic mutations that would explain the blood clot. They even collected my pee, which I snapped this fun action shot of:
The great thing is that with all of the tests, poking, and prodding, not one thing went up my butt. Small victories.
The doctors also couldn’t understand why I didn’t have chest pains or trouble breathing, which they said should be expected with the clot in my lungs. At one point, one of the doctors made me think I had cancer, but another doctor clarified that wasn’t remotely the case.
Every day I begged to doctors to release me from the hospital. The food sucked, TV sucked, because of COVID-19 I couldn’t have any visitors, and I figured I could just as easily lay around doing nothing at home. Also, they wouldn’t let me shower or give me a sponge bath so I was getting pretty ripe. They apparently wanted to keep an eye on me due to the severity of the clot.
Eventually they let me come home and I’ve been in drug-induced stupor for a couple of weeks. My leg is actually getting better and I’m weening myself off the painkillers. I only take one at night because I can’t get to sleep without it. I think in a couple more days I’ll stop altogether.
I had a follow-up with the hematologist and he still doesn’t know why I got this blood clot but said that all the tests show that it was a probably an anomaly and there doesn’t seem to be much risk of it happening again.
My theory is that on the Saturday after I first blacked out, I sat on my couch for almost 24 hours straight. I told this story to every doctor and nurse and it didn’t dawn on any of them that it might be the cause. They all asked if I had taken any long trips lately because that’s one ways people get blood clots. Sitting on a sofa for a solid day is the same thing as taking an 18-hour flight to Thailand.
In any case, I have to keep taking the blood thinners for 3 months and they are expensive as hell. Thanks to Obamacare, I now have shit health insurance that doesn’t cover very much. I’m not really sure how I’m going to pay for all of this but maybe I’ll become an illegal alien so the state of California will pick up the bill.
I just wanted to say thanks to all of our readers who were concerned for my wellbeing and wished me well. As fucked up as things have been for the past 3 weeks, it’s nice to know there are people out there who care.
Oh, I almost forgot the best news. It turns out I can still drink beer on the blood thinners. I thought alcohol was a no-go, but doc says it’s okay in moderation, which is a word I don’t understand.
