The next morning, I arose, made the coffee and headed out the door for the newspaper. As I stepped down on the garage floor (two steps) a pain shot up through my leg. I walked outside; now it really hurt and I almost collapsed in the driveway. I stumbled back into the garage and used the car as a prop as I moved towards the back door. I ended up crawling into the house and laying there until the pain abated. I crawled to the rear bedroom and hailed the bride. She was amazed to see me on the floor!
“It’s my leg,” I muttered. The pain abated and I made it to the couch. I looked at my leg. My God, it was swollen to twice the size of the other limb and was as hard as a rock! “I think you need to take me to emergency!” She did.
We speculated as to the cause. A spider bite? An infection? We didn’t have a clue.
The Emergency Room people immediately recognized it as a possible blood clot and arranged for an ultrasound test to confirm the preliminary diagnosis. Yep! That’s what it was!
It was recommended that I be hospitalized for a “day or two.” Sounded good to me! They checked me in and immediately began attacking me with needles filled with a drug called Lovenox and pills of a rat poison called Coumadin or Warfarin. I would be in the hospital until my blood thinned to a therapeutic level as determined by what was called an IN/R test of a value between two and three on some obscure scale. It also meant a daily blood test where I got stuck with a needle at 5:30 in the morning or earlier. That made three punctures a day.
My doctor was a Filipino lady who struggled with both language and bedside manner. Hell, it wasn’t her leg that throbbed and ached. We did eventually reach a satisfactory level of communication.
I learned a lot during my stay. My condition was called DVT or deep vein thrombosis. It can be very serious if a clot gets to the lungs. It is caused by injury, pregnancy or stasis. Mine was caused by stasis or inactivity and had been, looking back, coming on for a while. I was counseled on diet and exercise and even by an occupational therapist because a nurse reported I was a writer. I was lucky in a way. There can be tissue damage caused by DVT and some experience intense pain. I felt discomfort but really couldn’t call it pain.
It took seven days before my blood thinned out. That was 15 shots of Lovenox and 8 blood tests! They added a pneumonia shot for good measure and then my arm was swelled up!
They said it might be months before the swelling in my leg goes down. Sometimes it never does. It’s no longer as hard as a rock, so that’s progress. It’s a protein in the body that works to dissolve the clot and that takes time. Every time I talk to my regular doctor I am reminded to keep the leg elevated. My blood is checked every ten days or so for IN/R. I’m trying to exercise on a treadmill but that results in discomfort after a few minutes so I don’t push it, even though my internist said to exercise as much as I could stand. I guess there’s not much worry about the thing ‘breaking loose’ and traveling to the lungs.
The support shown by family and friends was heartwarming both to my bride and myself. People called, people visited and that was the upside of the episode. Suffice to say it’s really good to be back home!
Thad McAfee is a novelist and civil war buff. His latest publication is Sulfur Creek, released in August, 2009.
Permission to Reprint is Granted.
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